Simple question, why is military spending the one part of government spending the Republicans like?
Answer, $140 Billion in procurment contracts, along with billions more in contracts for food, gate guards, payroll, and everything else the military used to do for themselves.
How to reduce the wasteful spending on the military, thus diverting funds for things like food for kids and medicine for 50-somethings?
How to fix it? After the break.
Two step process:
First, the President tells every military branch to go over every contract and look for any way to do it in house. We can use Army and Marine corps E-5's to guard our bases, instead of contract guards. We can go back to FSA's and CS's and other military cooks providing the food in our galleys. We can have PS's (personnel specialists) and other admin ratings go back to providing payroll for the troops.
Then we start looking at our procurement budgets, and start taking it "in house." Wanna bet that the Army doesn't have weapons experts and engineers who can design armored vehicles? You think the Navy can't design a ship? Could the Air Force figure out what they want in a plane?
What is the difference between the technical skills needed to repair a weapon system, and the technical skills required to build one on an assembly line?
Yes, this means a 50% increase in manning for the military-well, given the sequester, maybe replacing cuts with a 40% increase. But that is good too. In Iraq we discovered that our military wasn't big enough, we couldn't cover all the jobs "over there," and still have enough time back home for our troops to see their families. If we have a bunch of "military jobs," where E4's, E5's, E6's build tanks and M16's, those are "dwell time," jobs where the troops can see their spouses and kids every day after work.
What do we lose? Well, we lose a whole lot of jobs that are based on "military contracts." We lose a lot of pressure to build extra weapon systems to keep a "key supplier" open. We lose pressure to allow Abrams Tanks, Hornets and other weopon systems to be sold to foreign nations of dubious alliance, again to protect those "key suppliers."
Oh, and we lose pressure to keep a large military budget to provide jobs in key districts. We lose pressure to keep a large military budget to provide profits to corporations willing to make big donations to re-elections. We lose pressure to start wars to make sure we need to buy more ammo and weapon systems, and to justify all the military spending.
The congress decides how much is spent on what, but the President decides when during the year, and how. Remember how Bush shifted funds from government workers to contracts (with Halliburton)? Obama can do the opposite.