Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is following through on his previously stated intent to reduce our defense spending:
Pentagon to cut spending by $78 billion, reduce troop strength
By Craig Whitlock and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 6, 2011; 3:38 PM
The Pentagon will have to cut spending by $78 billion over the next five years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday, forcing the Army and Marine Corps to shrink the number of troops on active duty and eventually imposing the first freeze on military spending since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
When Gates first announced his intent to implement cuts, in May of 2010, it was laced with symbolism, as he did so at the Presidential Library of the President that first warned of the dangers of having an un-fettered Military Industrial Complex: President Dwight Eisenhower.
"Increasing health care costs, a top-heavy uniformed and civilian management force, and big-ticket weapons systems are swelling the military's budget at an "unsustainable" rate, Gates said. In response, Gates said, he has ordered the Defense Department's military and civilian leaders to find savings of 2 to 3 percent -- more than $10 billion of the Pentagon's roughly $550 billion base budget -- and shift spending toward war-fighting costs.These savings must stem from root-and-branch changes that can be sustained and added to over time," he told an audience Saturday at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene. "Simply taking a few percent off the top of everything on a onetime basis will not do."
On his way out of office in 1961, President Eisenhower -- the former general who led allied forces in Europe during World War II -- warned of the expanding influence of what he called the "military-industrial complex." Nearly 50 years later, Gates invoked that history to warn that the cuts on the way "will displease powerful people, both inside the Pentagon and out."
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Gates is prescient in his warning that this will be met with heavy resistance. The MIC lobbyists, the pork-barrel Congressmen and Senators with a heavy-duty defense industry presence in their districts and states, and the Republican "defense spending at the expense of everything else" hawks will surely be doing everything that they can to keep these cuts from being implemented.
While the 78 billion in cuts is a good thing and will add to the savings in our defense budget as we withdraw completely from Iraq this year and then start to draw down in Afghanistan over the next few years, what may be the most significant thing about Gates' policies is that he wants to change the way in which business is done in general at the Dept. of Defense, that he wants to make things more efficient and reactive to what our needs are and move us away from procuring a bunch of weapons systems that we just don't really have any need for, ie. throwing gobs of money at defense contractor CEOs that waste taxpayers money on stuff that serve no purpose other than lining the pockets of the very rich in the defense industry. This is, indeed, the tune that we need to be hearing from a Secretary of Defense:
"To maintain the kind of military needed for America’s leadership role requires not only adequate levels of funding, but also fundamentally changing the way our defense establishment spends money and does business," Gates said. "That is why it is so important to follow through on the program of reform and overhead reduction.
http://www.defense.gov/...
Who would have thought that a Secretary of Defense who was appointed by the Bush Administration would be making these kinds of moves? Many have criticised President Obama for keeping Gates on, but it does seem that it was not done without sound reason.