Meanwhile the DOD will continue vaccuuming up taxpayer money and doing god knows what with it for god knows what reasons
But Elon's first act as efficiency co-czar was to get get Trump elected and he'll now need to trim Trillions just to come out even.
People will be unhappy though
Spare parts for the Whizz-Banger which we would probably never use because you only need to replace that part maybe one time in the ship's life? Yea, buy ten of those! Fancy pocket tools and knives for every human onboard the ship, even the guys who sit at a desk ordering supplies? Sure, get two of them each, so they have a spare!
I always wondered why they did that "reset the budget to the lowest quarter" type of thing, just set a budget and if there is a surplus then next year the taxpayers don't have to pay as much. I don't know who ran the budgeting system, but it was fucked how badly we wasted money during quarters where nothing broke on the ship.
I don't read the news anymore to save my mental state, but I hope that this DOGE is a positive influence instead of just more oligarchy in action, though I am not holding my breath.
This is just 100% accepted as a universal law of bureaucracy. As long as individual managers own parts of a budget, it applies to large corporations, non profits, and perhaps most of all in government.
It's called use it or lose it - we would also overspend by as much as we could get away with so we had justification for asking for a higher budget next year.
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.
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.
These 4 years are not going to be normal just like most of 2016-2020 was not normal
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.
Not really—cut their budget and force them to compensate.
> and therefore all changes require touching and gaining approval through a monstrous about of stakeholders
Notably not the people footing the bill, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's nearly always disappointing with these types of cuts is what happens when you actually look at the numbers. CBO's 2021 estimate of 2021-2030 Nuclear Force costs are here: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-05/57130-Nuclear-Force...
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.
And inside the IT field it's even worse.