If you, and only you, had the responsibility to spend the Defense/Military budget for 2010 how would you spend it?
Oh I don't know nearly enough about budgetting or planning to assume wisdom here. I would however point out the BS and redirect the funds towards the troop and small unit effectiveness. The Air Force got caught trying to scam a multi-billion dollar plan for new refeulers they didn't need in 2004. Thanks to a few Senators, who understood the military, jail sentences were handed out. Instead the money was sent to the Navy for upgraded nuclear submarines (you know...just in case the Middle East got into the nuclear sub business or in case China's vast naval fleet threatens the oceans). The Air Force's F/A-22 is more than good enough to face off with any foe in the world and then some, yet it took President Obama to pull the reigns in on the dreamers who think our foes are going to be flying Tie Fighters.
Despite my complaining about it, they have done an excellent job in supplying the troop equipment recently considering the history of neglect. We have gotten new gun and rifle upgrades. New aiming systms (ACOG) for the M16s. A new pistol is on the way. A new grenade launcher is being issued. A new helmet meant to ricochet better has been issued. New camouflage technology has been appied to our uniforms. Body armor (which stops 7.62 before a plate cracks) has replaced our fragmentation vests (which merely protected against fragments from explosions). New boots.
* But just a portion of those billions of dollars towards systems we do not need could have been applied towards personal radio systems for the troops. Hand and arm signals only work if you can see your team members and the urban environment of today's conflicts are not too friendly to this. The demand for greater personal communications forced the PRR (Personal Role Radio), but there wasn't enough and it was extremely limited to range. Further, they were too weak to pass comms through walls (concrete kills frequencies from weak sources).
* Democrats complaining about body armor in 2002 (as if we had it in Somalia and Bosnia under Clinton or in the Gulf War under Bush.....etc.) got us new vests, but it exposed our kidneys (which our fragmentation vests of old did not). The fix was some attachments that are cumbersome and awkward but forever in development.
* The demand for a better pack system has seen a few different designs and systems come through our supply since the late 90s. All of which have been great pains in the asses and weak, which is why they continually force something new upon us.
* The road trip to Baghdad in 2003 proved two things to us. One, our new SMART-T system allowed us to move faster and further than ever before, but two, our maintenace and supply systems could not keep us with the maneuvering forces. because we got bogged down into camps shortly after and the need to update these systems were not demanded, little has been done. The next "invasion" will show the same problems.
* The Blue Force Tracker (BFT) proved to save lives in 2003 in regards to fratricide, but to this day it has not seen a single significant upgrade. In a world of twitter, e-mails, and webcam, the 13 year old teenager has better contact with a guy in Cambodia than a MSgt has with a Colonel 10 miles away.
* IEDs were kicking our asses at one point. The Democratic complaint for protection brought us the UpArmor system, which totally screwed up our vehicles. because it made it difficult for the troop to get in and out of the vehicle and to effectively aim his weapon around it was common to see UpArmor stacked on the side of the road instead of on the vehicles. The fix to this was the MRAP. While the MRAP saved lives, it causes long term damage to the troop inside. Imagine being thrown around a metal can while bleeding from your ears because the explosive sound gets contained within. It's greatest danger is its potential for roll over. It is far too heavy and hardly expeditious.
These are just off the top of my head. But notice the trend? No matter the subject, it is always in need of improvement? One of the reasons we have had upgrades at all since this whole desert effort began was because politicians decided to use us as a tool. But the reason we have gone through so many trials in our upgrades at the troop level (body armor, helmets, BFT, UpArmor,packs, etc.) is because there is no return in it. And since there is no return in it, the bare minimum suffices. Nobody makes money by producing a final good body armor product or a final good pack product. How much money would it actually take to actually develop a good body armor system or pack for the lowly troop? I guarantee that civilian campers or civilian police departments have better equipment than the military. More focus is given to toys like the F/A-22 or a nuclear submarine that seem to forever need more money shoveled towards it and in the end they has no support value to the guy actually facing the enemy. While contractors receive checks for billions of dollars just to keep working on the next toy, the troop gets shotty equipment meant to appease the public, but not too invested.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe the $$ put in the FA-22 was less about internal profit, and more about international profit. Shock and Awe was like the Military-Industrial complex's version of the Apple Keynote session with Steve Jobs, or the E3 summit for Electronic Arts.
Well, it is a fact that most of the society changing technology has come from military investment. Even the Bronze Age saw invention come out of the need to supply weapons to warriors. Medicines and pesticides came out of the experimentation of military biological weapons. The Jet engine. Computers. Synthetic materials. Etc. In a globalizing world, the profit is becoming an international thing.