Won’t there be a “peace dividend” from withdrawing from Iraq and closing Gitmo?

Don’t we always cut personnel first because that’s the only near term cut that can be made? Time for reductions in the flag officer ranks?

Traditionally we also cut flight hours and weapons training and tie up ships. How about closing some more bases? Stop F-22 buys and convert to the F-35. Reduce the M-1 Abrams force by 1/3 and use that dead 1/3 for parts? FRAM some ships instead on new buys?

LOL…I guess that should read — “Speaking about Navy”.

You are all thinking small potatoes. This is a 10% cut in Total Obligation Authority. The top line for personnel is unlikely to go down, same for O&M. In that case, it means a 26% cut to everything else. I think we are looking at $48 billion out of the combined procurement and RDT&E lines this year — probably 130,000 defense jobs in industry. This cut is potentially big enough to eliminate every job at Raytheon twice over.

Virginias are totally safe. Aside from being the only major DoD program that is ahead of schedule and on budget, the SSN industry in RI, Conn. and VA have powerful congressional delegations which together have the power to keep them well kept.

I also think fewer programs will “end” we normally see in this environment and instead more will be slowed or pushed back. Amy Butler on Ares’ Check 6 podcast yesterday was pointing out that the USAF 2018 bomber was likely going to be pushed back past 2020, but in exchange it would grow more capable. There’s a good deal of money to be had simply slowing down things like FCS, F-35, BMD, etc. Coupled with reductions that will come from drawing down the Iraq force, and we’re not talking chump change.

DoD coulda used Citi’s cute little jet too

Moose, with these kinds of numbers, nothing is safe. This is going to gut the Navy. Looking at the details of what’s in the works, there’s not much room for a 10% cut without removing 20-25% of the procurement and R&D budgets.

The Navy has been gutted over the past 2 decades, despite DoD budgets going UP the last 7 and a half the fleet has shrunk and programs have ballooned. Would ADDING $50 Billion or $100 Billion or $1 Trillion cure the DoD’s ills? I doubt it. Wailing and gnashing teeth and accusing THIS 2-week old Administration of “Gutting the Navy” based on a budget we’ve not even seen outlined yet is preposterous.

Then how about having the military bill the White House and Congress for any travel they provide, at actual cost.

Yout got that right buddy-boy…

All this whining about corporate aircraft…Some folks need to look in the mirror.

Oh sorry.

This crowd -mules and elephants both- only peers through a looking glass when it comes to this kind of thing….

How about scrapping 90%of the mil spec requirments, and use the ASTM standard instead? Rationlizing the standards call-outs for materials would save a boat load of money, as would going over the material requirments for the existing ship programs. I’ve gone through serious pain and expense to the government getting the materials called out in the drawings. I did some research, and found that in many ways ASTM standards meet or exceed the mil spec requirements.

So why are we still doing it this way? First, a bunch of civil servants make their living upholding these standards, second, mil spec sends us to one-of vendors. Anyone want to guess how many of these vendors have a congressman in their pocket? Also, the compliance requirements force vendors and contractors to add an expensive layer of paper pushers that the government ends up paying for. We (the contractors) have to add the cost of this part of our business to contracts, and for the vendor side, the destructive and non-destructive testing adds another layer of costs. That’s why you get $150 hammers and $2000 toilets for KC-137.

Marine architects and engineers: the building programs wouldn’t be in such a mess (like the billions it’s going to take to resolve the wireway MCTs through bulkheads and decks issues on LPD-17, many of which caused compartments to be non-watertight)if the Navy itself had it’s own corp of dedicated personnel. All of our LARs, RLARs are written by the building yards. Most are good. Some aren’t.

Congressional interference via the civilian and uniformed members of DoD into the construction program has to end if you ever want to get a program that can meet your initial requirements, works the way it’s supposed to, and doesn’t go billions over budget. Don’t let the contractors have a free-fire zone in which they can pimp their latest gee-whiz or push the Navy into accepting things like “sole-supplier” line items in the bill of materials.

Yes, I’m a contractor. But I’m in the repair/conversion side of the business. For the most part, we dont’ have a lot of of wriggle room in which to screw the Navy over. We just have to get it done.

Mike, what kind of defensive and offensive weaponry could a Stilleto carry? What kind of networking ability will these fast boats have? Power generation required for comms/networking?

Do you really want to see the US Navy become a speedboat Navy?

Chief, you can mark that up to the unholy alliance between Congress and the milcorps.

Does anyone remember what happened to the southern California economy during the last major reduction in defense budget?

Forget asking about which Navy programs to cut. Completely wrong approach.

Why on God’s green Earth is Obama even considering this during an economic downturn? He is going to kill jobs with this plan. Why would he tell DoD to trim $48-50B now when he is asking Congress to approve nearly $1T in “stimulus.” Isn’t that straining at gnats and swallowing camels?

The only possible reason I can come up with is that Obama or someone on his team is allowing an anti-military ideology to drive this decision. Which is counter to the Obama campaigns claims of being without ideology during the general election. But if you look back at the more ideological primaries, this is what he said he would do.

The argument should be that this is NOT the time to cut DoD budget by 10%. When the economy improves AND the war is over, then we should about budget drawdown. Until then, it’s up to us to keep our elected leaders accountable and expose this for the stupidity it is.

Curtis, every day I sit down with a material requistion form….and every day I go over archaic prints (in that they are sometimes 25 years old) to make sure I’m ordering the proper call-out in the spec. You’d be amazed how many times an out-dated milspec is invoked and there is only one, repeat, one vendor that can furnish this at a price of course. So I’m not sure why you say we scrapped Mil-spec, unless you are talking about LCS.

One has to remember CDR Salamander’s source.

An unnamed source. Fox news.

That’s two strikes.

One should also remember the supposed cut is to a Pentagon budget request. Unquestionably, there’s plenty of pork in there that could easily be trimmed.

FOD,
You nibbled around the edges, now you have stepped in it – you are acting like a Troll.

Do a google search – there are plenty of sources out there. I keep politics out of the USNI blog, if you want to be petty and not contribute to the issue at hand, comment over at my home blog on or someone else’s posts.

Play that game again on one of my USNIBlog posts and I will Delete it.

You are put on notice.

I read in my new issue of Proceedings how a person could come here and expect civil discussion. I hope that’s the case. Because I’d like to make my case as to why the Navy needs to cut itself by almost half. The rest of the services need to do so as well, but this is the USNI blog, so I’ll focus on our Navy.

I was born and raised on a Navy base, then served 7 years active duty. I still work in naval aviation. Those are my qualifications to at least address the subject at hand.

Our country, in the past 5 months or so, has created about one trillion in new money. Depending on what the Senate does over the next week or so, it looks like we’ll be creating close to another trillion. This is all debt. There are no assets to sell, or taxes to collect to create this two trillion. This new debt is on top of our already existing ten trillion dollar debt. If you stop and think about it, the creation of debt like this is really a stealth tax. This new debt our government is currently printing is backed by nothing. It is fancy paper, or in some cases, just an electronic credit. Either way, it has no value but for the words, “THIS IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.” In effect, all of this massive debt creation is a tax on the future. We will pay it, and our children will pay it, and so on.

We can no longer afford this giant Navy or military. This country is broke. We are rapidly moving toward insolvency while we enslave future generations to a debt they have no control over, and had no say in its creation. Not only is that foolish, it is immoral. Something must be done. The Navy should lead the way by mothballing at least five CVBGs.

As one intimately involved with the legacy Hornet, I can tell you that this rapidly aging aircraft is becoming difficult to maintain. Don’t get me wrong, the jet can be maintained, but many, if not most of the aircraft, have gone well over their flight hour design life, and the need-list for repairs to areas we’ve not needed to repair in the past, is growing.

By mothballing at least five CVBGs, many of the oldest Hornets could be sent to AMARC. We could pick out the most desirable aircraft and use the rest for badly needed parts. Of course there’d be a drawdown in pilots and their attendant costs, and there would most definitely be savings in not having to put at least five carriers to sea. Manpower and the associated costs, e.g., retirement, medical care, housing, training, regular pay, all would be reduced. More Super Hornets could be bought. Those are but a few of the positives.

Negatives? I read a post here about how cutting the Navy now, in this time of economic turmoil, would be foolish. Point made, and point taken. However, by not cutting now, we’re only going to make the inevitable crash that much more difficult to contend with.

I see this as a way to strengthen the Navy, not weaken it. We’d have more money for training, more money for fresh aircraft, and we could strengthen the reserves.

I know I’m a bit radical here, but I think we need to return to the sort of military our founders envisioned. Our Army should be brought home and reduced. Personally, I’d like to see us move the Army to a “Swedish Model.” We need to stop entangling ourselves in places like Iraq, and going to a Swedish type Army would put a stop to such adventurism.

Our Navy is constitutionally authorized (unlike the standing, professional Army we currently put afield) and thus we should feel no shame in advocating for a professional Navy.

The U.S. Navy has always led from the front. Even with six or seven carrier battle groups we’d still have three times as many as any other nation on the globe.

I’ll stop there and listen to your counsel.

Tiptoeing past the current carnage, the news reports coming out today indicate that it’s a 50 billion dollar cut compared to what the JCS asked for, but a 40 billion dollar increase over the previous year and basically what the Bush administration was working with.

Wired has it.

As a life member of USNI, I take exception with *anyone* deleting anyone else’s posts, with the obvious exception of comments that are beyond the pale — (profanity, personal attacks, and the like).

Censorship always strikes me as, well, unAmerican. Feel free to do it on your own blog, but USNI ought to exercise that control, not guest bloggers.

Criticism keeps your ideas sharp, lest you fall into the morass of group think.

Here is the Danger Room post (most of it) from Wired.com:

Conservatives howled, when word leaked that the Obama White House might be looking to “cut” the Pentagon’s budget request for the next fiscal year. But it’s only under the odd rules of Beltway bizarroland that this can be considered in any way a trim.

As CQ’s Josh Rogin reports, Team Obama wants an eight percent, $40 billion increase in the Defense Department budget — from $487.7 billion in 2009 to $527.7 billion in 2010. But this uptick is only about half the size as the one the Joint Chiefs originally requested, in a $584 billion draft budget, complied last fall. So cue the all-too-predictable cries of Obama-as-hippie. “When it comes to the budget it appears that the choices Obama is making are all too reflective of a man who not long ago had the most liberal voting record in the Senate,” sniffs Max Boot.

Oh, please. The $527 billion figure is “what the Bush people thought was the right number last February and that’s the number we’re going with,” an Office of Management and Budget official tells Rogin. “The Joint Chiefs did that to lay down a marker for the incoming administration that was unrealistic. It’s more of a wish list than anything else.”