> As with civilian health care, savings are achievable here but face implacable opposition from military retirees. But as no less a military enthusiast than John McCain said last year on the Senate floor, “We are going to have to get serious about entitlements for the military just as we are going to have to get serious about entitlements for nonmilitary.”
It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity while cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you fucking take care of them.
The cost of health care needs to be factored into wars for 50-60 years afterwards, not framing the conversation with the word "entitlements" to subtly imply that ex soldiers are somehow taking more than they deserve. Lumping military in with bloated public sector employee benefits is shameful.
> not framing the conversation with the word "entitlements" to subtly imply that ex soldiers are somehow taking more than they deserve.
"An entitlement is a guarantee of access to something, such as to Social Security, Medicare or welfare benefits, based on established rights or by legislation." [1]
The word got tinged with a pejorative sense in recent years probably because it also has a definition in clinical psychology. We commonly say somebody "has a sense of entitlement".
I would not doubt that its a deliberate Republican talking point to use that word rather than "benefits" or "public assistance" in order to associate it with the psychological definition.
> In clinical psychology and psychiatry, an unrealistic, exaggerated, or rigidly held sense of entitlement may be considered a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder, seen in those who "because of early frustrations...arrogate to themselves the right to demand lifelong reimbursement from fate."
There are plenty of veterans who never were sent overseas to engage in combat, or ended up sitting around in gents playing DS when they were. Why should we handle their heart disease and prostate enlargement differently than a veteran of another government agency?
Keep reading the article. The main thrusts are: there are something like 2 million paper pushers in the defence force (civilians, military, and contractors). And that there's a lot of waste (such as equipment which is ready for deployment, but doesn't actually work).
I doubt the US can cut the support they give soldiers much more. They are already paying close to minimum wage (unlike the admins, who no doubt make a lot more). If they cut much more, they'll pretty much have to start offering prisoners pardons for signing on (which will drive out good candidates, and piss a lot of people off).
> It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity while cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you fucking take care of them.
Why? They're professionals, they knew the risks and accepted the gambles. It's not like you went and conscripted a bunch of poor bastards, or tricked them into it.
It seems to me you either believe that everyone deserves decent health protection - in which case what you decide here has implications for how the national system should run - or you don't. But being hired for soldiering seems an odd point at which to digress from the general rule.
In recent times, in the US, the benefits veterans receive are certainly something they consider going in. Reducing those benefits pretty much turns it into a trick.
> you sent other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you fucking take care of them
Wouldn't it be nice if Congress had to guarantee $200,000 per year, for life for each person who's been to war?
That should serve to make Congress that much more reluctant to send people to new wars. Unfortunately, with technology advancing so rapidly, they would probably only have that much more incentive to make autonomous killer robots real, and to make massively more drones. I think they're still going for that anyway, just at a slower pace than it would happen with such a law.
Wars would be a lot costlier in the long run, and it would be like basically paying debt on a war you had, for life. But as I said, I fear such a disincentive would actually incentivize them to send more robots to wars.
Today "Defense Budget" is an euphemism, it should be called "Attack Budget", or "Ministry of War" budget, like it was in the past.
US is today the main aggressor in the world, what China an Russia are doing by economic treaties, the US is using force alone. Afganistan, Iraq, Libia, Siria.
US is trying to force people in the world to keep using the petrodollar, but they had abused so much their power(printing it like crazy and exporting inflation and poverty to other countries), that the rest of the world is looking for alternatives, and they will find them.
All empires try to sustain past glories by force, from the Spanish empire in Nederlands to British Empire in India, Germany(France) and Japan(in China) before WWII. But empires come and go.
It's sad that so many people don't even realize that US wants to "maintain the peace" by going to war. It's basically the same excuse that's been used by empires for millennia.
There could be so many solutions that could be used to cure the root cause of attacks against US, but most of them are completely unacceptable to the people running the military in US, and the MIC. Their solution is always war and destroying those that oppose them (even if that "solution" creates even more problems in the long term for the security of US).
It's the same problem with the NSA, which is run by an army general, who just happens to be not-amusingly nicknamed "Emperor Alexander". Instead of thinking that in order to make the Internet infrastructure in US secure by default (including banks, and whatever institution they tend to use in their arguments), they think that they need to have access to everything themselves, through loopholes, and they say that's what will keep the US infrastructure safe - when in fact they're just making it less secure. But that's okay, because it just means they get to ask for "bigger budgets to fix it", just like the military gets to ask for bigger budgets, after they create more terrorists with drone assassinations, double taps, and signature strikes.
Most empires don't start out that way. In many cases those nations were abused prior, or invaded. Usually while maintaining a shell of a military. What they learned by experience is...If you don't want someone to take a shot at you, kill you, pillage the village, and rape your women, more or less hell on earth, you have to crush everyone. This is axiomatic because of human nature. Someone somewhere will not play ball and be civil. Someone somewhere will cause massive damage to you and your livelihood if you give them the chance. You may not have met them, but they certainly exist.
There is wisdom in this laconic phrase: Si vis pacem, para bellum
You could probably wipe the whole US military excepting the nuclear program and not have to worry about anything except an internal coup d'etat/assassination spree initiated by the mostly useless contractors/generals that get fired as a result.
Does the nation run the army or does the army and its assorted industrial parasites run the nation? I doubt anyone in Washington has the testicular fortitude to find out.
Criticism: "B-b-b-but you can't use nukes to put down internal rebellions(1) or bring liberty to the oppressed nations of the world(2)!!"
Response to 1: "That's what the police+national guard is for."
Nuke their conventional forces. They're coming by sea, right? Here, let's be hyper-paranoid and hang on to the drones and about half of the Air Force. It's still more than enough to wipe out any aggressive force before it can make landfall.
This isn't the Middle Ages where pansy nobles played at war and had dinner together in between having their peasants butcher each other. If the US and Russia were to go to war it wouldn't be an honorable clash and if our tanks beat their tanks and our planes beat their planes well gosh darnit guess they give up Siberia.
Here's a thought experiment: if India didn't have a strong conventional force in Kashmir and just threatened to use nukes on Pakistan if they invaded, would Pakistan call them on it? And if the Indians did toss a nuke, would Pakistan really respond and invite a few dozen others?
Of course it plays better with the population to have war once in a while. Gives the illusion of change, drives a narrative and so on. But I doubt most major decision makers are crazy enough to risk prolonged nuclear exchange.
The lesson I take from that video is maybe slightly different: Why go to war with the Soviets at all? Would my life as a British/US citizen be better with Gorbachev/the USSR in charge or would it be better after a prolonged nuclear exchange or would it be better after a decade of conventional World War 3?
Freedom and independence are overrated and not being dead, starving and at war are underrated by modern societies to a staggering extent.
I was discussing hypothetical nuclear scenarios with a friend the other night and was genuinely wondering why the US even maintains their nuclear arsenal. Globally, would anyone stand for a nuclear attack on the US? If a smaller country or terrorist organization did initiate a nuclear attack on the US, would there be a nuclear response?
I would go further and suggest that not only would national security not suffer by cutting the military budget, it could actually be improved. Much of our military deployment around the world is like an insurance policy that costs more over time than the event it attempts to insure against. Not only that, military spending has a lost opportunity cost; it may be that our national security actually depends more on education than on weapons, in which case some proportion of the defense money we're spending is detracting from security, not improving it.
This is a good article about trying to increase the Pentagon's efficiency. Of course, we're getting many typical extreme left comments on HN. It probably also worth discussing how to actually improve the organization so that it does run leaner and how to make contractors more accountable.
This is probably the main point:
"Fortunately, there are ways to cut defense spending without hurting military capabilities. Besides maintaining its war-fighting capability, DoD, like any entity, maintains a back-office bureaucracy to oversee its business functions. That overhead accounts for roughly 40 percent of its budget. It’s hard to compare different industries, or even government agencies, but one examination of 25 industries showed average overhead rates ranging from 13 to 50 percent, with the average across all industries being 25 percent. A RAND study of overhead and administration costs among defense contractors found them to be “tremendous drivers” of weapon costs at 35 percent. The largest domestic programs—Social Security and Medicare—get by with costs in the single-digits."
You could probably cut defense by 10% relatively easily without hurting capabilities, if you actually had buy-in from the pentagon, rather than them trying to make the most visibly painful cuts to get it reversed.
I actually think we could cut by 50-75% over time and receive the same net benefits, by changing force structure, reducing "optional" missions like going to war in Iraq, and fixing the acquisitions process. You would be reducing capabilities at that point, but not in ways which hurt national security. It would take a while due to retirement and medical obligations.
I'd be willing to listen to someone who wanted to cut 90% ultimately. That would require fundamentally recasting the US military as a wholely domestic force, with a much slower reaction time to new threats, but might ultimately be preferable if the world becomes more peaceful.
Eventually people will come around to Ron Paul's ideas for the military spending and military policy. Hopefully there will still be trustworthy presidential candidate with integrity that will be able to "charge ahead" with such a policy, when most people are "ready" for it, and don't buy the typical MIC line, that if even $1 is cut from the military's budget, the terrorists will win.
I sometimes wonder if the real issue isn't security so much as no one wants to admit an uneasy truth: the US is in decline and can no longer afford its military power.
It is even worse: The US has been in decline for decades and military and "homeland security" spending is used to mask decline and juice-up economic statistics.
To have to pose the question that way is disturbingly timid. Who doesn't see that the US spends at least 10X what it would take to deter anyone from even thinking about building a credible military threat.
The incredible expense of our recent wars illustrates why this is true: It takes so much money to move a modern force across an ocean and keep them supplied when there is zero attempt to interdict supply lines that it would be astronomically expensive to invade any nation across an ocean if they could put up any threat at all to supply lines.
Our military spending militarizes American society. Police are militarized. We think we have an uptick in manufacturing but if you subtracted out the military manufacturing we would have very little productive manufacturing. We don't realize just how huge a dead weight we are carrying in jobs and capex that produce zero gain in our standard of living.
Cutting military spending, and building an economy that delivers credible performance numbers without that empty unproductive spending is the economic priority of our age.
Then again, it only takes one, relatively small attack, like 9/11 to break the fragile minds of the market and instill fear in the people. Now there's a great loss in capital. Having said that, to build a credible military threat would essentially require a joint strike force against the U.S. Before that gets written off, stranger things have happened in the last 100 years.
Having said that, I do believe a lot of money could be better allocated outside and within the military. That is to say, I think we should aim to get more from less. I'd like to point my finger at government contracting overhead, I think the financial belt could be cinched quite a bit.
Lay out the narrative. Is there a threat that would emerge before all our soldiers are on pension and all our weapons are museum pieces? If not, why be incremental about restructuring?
It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity while cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you fucking take care of them.
The cost of health care needs to be factored into wars for 50-60 years afterwards, not framing the conversation with the word "entitlements" to subtly imply that ex soldiers are somehow taking more than they deserve. Lumping military in with bloated public sector employee benefits is shameful.