Yeah, any talk about “reigning in government spending/waste” that doesn’t start and end with the military is totally unserious. The DOD wastes more money every day than all the usual suspects in this kind of talk do in a year.
The major suspects this time around are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those agencies are very efficient by normal measures. But Elon/Vivek are coming at it from a perspective that considers their entire mission to be 100% waste. From that perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.
> From perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.
It's extremely difficult to take anyone who suggests introducing a profit margin to reduce waste as acting serious. (I realize you were probably indicating they weren't bluffing; just saying.) Plus, they can account for their spending and the DOD cannot.
The main point seems to be to cut spending on these programs. If one sees them as nothing but waste then that’s automatically a reduction.
It’s a pretty extreme view, but I think it’s serious. Destroying these programs has long been a dream of the more libertarian extremes of the Republican Party.
Fortunately for the people who depend on these programs, “DOGE” isn’t real and has no power to do anything.
It’s as real as Trump decides it’s real. All he has to do is instruct his administration to not disburse the money and the Supreme Court has already ruled that Presidents have presumptive immunity for official acts, i.e. you can’t even bring the administration to court over it as the act of questioning their action inhibits the presidency
These 4 years are not going to be normal just like most of 2016-2020 was not normal
Waste and inefficient spending in the DoD sphere is incredibly difficult to tackle. The article highlights two anecdotes/situations that are shared by the DoD and wider federal enterprise - that knowledge and power is generally actually incredibly diffuse across an organization, and therefore all changes require touching and gaining approval through a monstrous about of stakeholders, and that vendors can be giant dicks.
DoD challenges are compounded by being tasked to do relatively unique things for the American public. What is a reasonable price to pay for a training exercise where Marines actually get to deploy a anti ship missile battery onto a lonely Pacific Island? Is the incremental cost of 3 versus 2 of these exercises a year worth while? Valuing many of things the military does, both in terms of what their positive value is, as well as what their costs -should- be is difficult, since we have so little analogous scenarios to draw on.
Without confident and broadly consensus (or at least with sufficient top level cover and firepower) valuations on benefits and costs, any attempt to reduce spending just slams into resistance (both truly well meaning, as well as reflexive and self-serving).
Another major DoD challenge is that outside of the IT field, the DoD asks for industrial competency and competitiveness that frankly the overall US industrial base looks to barely be able to meet. And so not only is it inflicted by vendors acting like dicks, they're inflicted by incompetent vendors acting like dicks.
> Another major DoD challenge is that outside of the IT field, the DoD asks for industrial competency and competitiveness that frankly the overall US industrial base looks to barely be able to meet. And so not only is it inflicted by vendors acting like dicks, they're inflicted by incompetent vendors acting like dicks.
There is some waste that can be trimmed without sacrificing capabilities but those savings are limited and hard to identify. Overall the military is actually under funded for all the global missions it's tasked to perform and the strain is starting to show. Any real savings will require trimming down the mission set. Should we eliminate one leg of the nuclear triad? Back off from defending our treaty allies? Stop protecting the global sea lanes? Give up on being able to fight two major conflicts simultaneously? There doesn't seem to be much political consensus in Congress for any of those options.
And let's not have any uninformed claims that we can somehow achieve huge savings while maintaining capabilities just by swapping manned platforms for drones. That is simply science fiction, and even if the technology was ready the savings would be marginal.
> Should we eliminate one leg of the nuclear triad?
Yes, actually; two of them. Air-based nuclear bombs barely made sense in WWII; with modern IADS, the idea that you're going to get nuclear bombers through to target is laughable.
As for land-based assets, they're all in known locations built to withstand strikes that even conventional weaponry can take out these days. Sure, you can put them on mobile launchers and move them around like Russia, but then you have major security problems with hauling them around the country where people can potentially get near them.
The only part of the nuclear triad that actually matters for deterrence is the SLBMs.
I read suggestions at least 40 years ago that we should get rid of all land based nuclear assets because, in the case of an actual nuclear war, they will massively increase the amount of radioactive fallout and long term contamination the survivors will have to deal with.
The estimated total costs over that time frame (this includes spending on B-21+LRSO, Columbia Class SSBN and Sentinel ICBM development) is 634 billion dollars. ICBMs and strategic bombers are budgeted at ~130 billion, and SSBNs are 145 billion.
If you took the 634 billion, and cut out the ICBM and Bombers and tactical weapons, and cut the nuclear weapons lab/support facility cost by 2/3 (this is way optimistic), and cut the communications and C&C cost by 2/3 (this is also way optimistic), you end up with total savings over the 10 years of ~275 billion (44%).
This is not chump change. Unfortunately, the current (2024) DoD yearly budget (note that many of the costs above are split between DoD and DoE) is 825 billion. The same CBO estimate puts the nuclear budget at ~7% of the total defense budget over the same 10 year period. So these cuts get us a ~3% overall decrease to the DoD budget.
This is certainly a major achievement, but unfortunately it's probably the single largest/easiest decision to make. Every single choice past this just gets harder and harder with smaller and smaller wins.
The challenge is that the US establishment firmly believes that American supremacy is both good for the world, and good for America and Americans.
No president (including Trump the first time) has yet been able to bring in enough true outsiders who were willing to gamble on this proposition to force through this type of change.
Consider if you really wanted to cut down on DoD spending, but you also believed that on a whole, American force projection was a good thing, but you just wished we could do so more cost effectively. If you're the big guy at the top pushing down these types of "30% budget cut, go figure it out", you're going to get push back from every corner saying that it's not possible without conceding on some critical capability.
As a single person, you could run down some of these claims and figure out which ones are bullshit, and ram your changes through. But you can't manage them all. So now you need more and more helpers to help you sort through the bullshit.
As long as you are hamstrung by the belief that maybe, just maybe, it's useful (or worse, vital) to have 11 carriers available (btw, that's a law, not just DoD policy) so that you can have 2-3 at sea at any point, you're going to run into problems trying to ram through straight budget cuts.
You can also just wind up increasing overall waste - i.e. the defense procurement classic is "we ordered 200, but we want to save money so we're cutting the order to 100". In practice of course, this does not halve the price of the contract, you'd be lucky if it's even 25% less because you weren't ordering "200 of already built thing" you were ordering "200 of thing with it's own production line, tooling, compliance costs and staff and workforce".
So ramming through a bunch of budget cuts might necessarily involve cutting a whole bunch of programs like that...but the effect is you've just ensured you pay proportionally more, to get less, despite the fact you had more then enough cash on hand for the original order.
Which is the problem with a year over year budget: the upfront price of the massive order of whatever it is might be that over time it's going to be far cheaper once delivered (or that it's delivery for the next 20 years of supply)...but the budget for it is only approved year by year.
