many many things from the military are open for cuts.
one of the things that gets me is the constant changing of gear,since vietnam we have used most of the same gear up untill 9/11,most of it was quite effective and simple,some not so effective but they were phased like example the old vests.during the war on terror we have been spending 750k-1.5 mil on vehicles that hold no better odds of surviving an ied due to lack of restraints(armor is no good in a rollover if a 20 pound ammo can flies at your head at 50 miles an hour)plus we could have done the same with uparmored humvees by just adding a v hull,billions and billions spent that no one gained from except contractors.
the military even stateside has been trying to replace humvees with the newer matv/jltv trucks,which are massively expensive and when we got them in afghanistan,broke down every other day due to overpriced oversensitive electronic(kiss rule was not applied when approving this truck)yet this same truck has less functionality than a humvee,and about 10 998 or 1097 humvees can be rebuilt or bought new for the price of one of these,its too small inside to be an effective troop carrier,and too high off the ground with too small a bed to be a small cargo truck.basically a truck the size of an lmtv,passenger capacity of a 4 door humvee,no extra room beyond passengers,and no cargo capability except from its bed the size of a kids tonka truck.
new rifles are constantly being aquisitions,yet do not improve over the old models,or actually work worse with a high price tag,sad part is the old model a-2 rifles were capable of most the addons as seen on the rail systems,but somewhere along the lines someone thought it was great to fix what wasnt broken.
furniture-this one boggles my mind,my unit refused to buy anything from lack of funds until the end of the fiscal year,then my brigade bought 150k worth of furniture,money that could have gone to equipment we didnt have(our motor pool pretty much consisted of 1 full toolbox,a crescent wrench,and a tankers bar)dont know why such waste is allowed,at my company level when the end of the fiscal year came,the commander and the xo would ask every section what they need that they could get during the year.however it seemed at every higher level waste became more abundant.
during my deployment i saw units basically having unit wars over who could build the biggest monuments to their units.my unit built a 60k dollar smoke pit with the unit logo,to try and compete with 1 air cav and 3rd acr,they also built the most expensive and elegant uso ever seen,the large camps like bagram couldnt compete with that uso.the fact that not only does the military permit such actions,but allows it fully,just shows they really dont care about budgets.
of all the examples listed above shows money severely wasted where it shouldn't have been,now i dont know why we need to freeze pay or cut medical when the army and airforce are running around with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of worthless equipment,yet during my deployment the marines and the navy were still using the old pasgt helmets,still driving the old 998 huvees held together by duct tape,and with less equipment and much much less funds are still in the front line doing fine.
in my opinion we need to stop spending on useless equipment,it has been shown to save no lives and give us no advantage,just hundred and hundreds of billions of dollars into design contractors pockets.