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OUR military is FAT !! What can we trim?

SenorXm/Sirius said:
Right, being defenseless may not be that big of a deal on the east Coast, but neither is a mortar attack.

You want to spend a b'zillion on defense? I don't. We were the world's cop for 40+ years of the cold war. That ended and me, and millions more thought great, lets spend more money here. And let Europe, the ME, etc. take more responsibility for their own defense. But me, and others forgot about the MIC, and how hypocritical politicians are, especially those so called 'fiscally conservative Republicans'. They don't want to cut spending, they only want to cut the budgets that interfere with the social conservative ideology.

$2-$3 tril spent in Iraq while bridges are falling down here? Disgusting.
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Okay most of the money spent on the Iraq war would have been spent whether we are here or there. And the military isn't costing us roads and bridges. In the 1950's when we built the interstate highways system we were spending more than half the budget on the military. The military even after the 600billion is only about 1/6 of the total budget. Guess what is slowly squeezing out the military and infrastructure spending?
 
garyd said:
Okay most of the money spent on the Iraq war would have been spent whether we are here or there. And the military isn't costing us roads and bridges. In the 1950's when we built the interstate highways system we were spending more than half the budget on the military. The military even after the 600billion is only about 1/6 of the total budget. Guess what is slowly squeezing out the military and infrastructure spending?
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Entitlement spending is the bloated part of the budget now. by far.

Still they could trim some out of the defense budget.
Here is one budget item... from today -- Lockheed Martin gets a contract to sell F-35s to the military
Lockheed Martin scores $1.2B contract to produce F-35s for U.S. and foreign customers - San Antonio Business Journal

Now the F-35 they had to try out were grounded last year because well, they are crappy. The military has been decommissioning, and plans to decom more, of the A-10 the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18. The F-35 is the one jack of all trades jet they are sinking a lot of money into and according to some analysts from the RAND corp a few years back “The F-35 is double-inferior,” John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue concluded in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press. The new plane “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run,” they warned. There were analysts from other organizations critical as well.

In looking into it tons of flaws have been found over the last 8-12 years but I do not see that all that much has been fixed. This isn't the first time we have sank a ton of money into an inferior product.
Yet about half a trillion has already been spent on development with another half trillion + tentatively to be spent over the next ~5 years.
 
SocialD said:
Entitlement spending is the bloated part of the budget now. by far.

Still they could trim some out of the defense budget.
Here is one budget item... from today -- Lockheed Martin gets a contract to sell F-35s to the military
Lockheed Martin scores $1.2B contract to produce F-35s for U.S. and foreign customers - San Antonio Business Journal

Now the F-35 they had to try out were grounded last year because well, they are crappy. The military has been decommissioning, and plans to decom more, of the A-10 the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18. The F-35 is the one jack of all trades jet they are sinking a lot of money into and according to some analysts from the RAND corp a few years back “The F-35 is double-inferior,” John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue concluded in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press. The new plane “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run,” they warned. There were analysts from other organizations critical as well.

In looking into it tons of flaws have been found over the last 8-12 years but I do not see that all that much has been fixed. This isn't the first time we have sank a ton of money into an inferior product.
Yet about half a trillion has already been spent on development with another half trillion + tentatively to be spent over the next ~5 years.
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This is nothing new. The problem with the F-35 has a long history of similar faux pas. the chief problem is that they are trying to suit one air frame to handle multiple missions. This was the problem with the FB-111, the brain child of McNamara, the jack ass who got a hel lof a lot of my compatriots killed by insisting that, the M-16 needed neiteher the specialized poder nor the chromed bore specified, which though it saw service it was never really very good at either intended roll. After that was the xm-80 MBT the austere version of which became the M-1 Abrams. It was intended to have every possible bell and whistle you could possible hang on a tank including a chassis that could be raised and lowered hydraulically. Hopefully some one will come in and have the project rationalized and make something useful out of it.
 
JohnfrmClevelan said:
I agree with improving the military, and I also agree with improving the grid and investing in green energy. But what have we really gained by trimming?

When you cut government spending, you cut jobs. When you cut down on the size of your military (in people), you cut jobs directly. So the government spends a bit less, and thousands of young men and women are thrown into a job market that already can't supply enough jobs. Unless the government spends enough money investing in infrastructure and other projects to absorb all of that labor, the cuts have just created a bigger problem than they have solved.

Why not just invest more in domestic projects and leave the military alone? The government cannot run out of money, you know.
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Sorry, this thread has already matured before I saw it, but. . . if that's the case, then why not expand military spending?
 
We don't seem to have any interest in using our army. Perhaps we could cut that back.
 
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