An excerpt from an interesting opinion piece from Charles V. Peña at the Christian Science Monitor:
The real challenge is not to find “efficiency savings” in the DoD – reducing overhead and growth, but continuing to perpetuate an outsized budget to sustain “the US military’s size, reach, and fighting strength” as advocated by Gates.(There are some 195 countries in the world, and the US has military forces deployed in more than 150 of them.) This is the only way to truly save money.
The plan Gates has touted amounts to defense spending legerdemain to find $100 billion worth of efficiency savings to maintain the defense budget at or near it’s current level over the course of five years. That’s merely a promise to stop budget growth by the end of the next five years – a promise not to spend an additional $100 billion dollars.
But if we redefined our strategy to meet our true national security requirements (rather than broad global security), we could instead realize a real reduction of $100 billion (perhaps more), in the defense budget, phased in over five years – starting now.
You can read the whole piece here.
