The NY Times has a editorial up providing suggestions for trimming the defense budget that includes this:
PERSONNEL Pay and benefits account for nearly half of the basic Pentagon budget. The size of the uniformed services should not be reduced, at least for now. The Pentagon’s civilian work force, currently 650,000, should be cut by up to 10 percent, saving more than $7 billion a year.
We in no way minimize the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform. But after years of lagging far behind, military pay is now more than $5,000 a year higher than comparable civilian employment, more than $10,000 a year higher when special allowances and benefits are counted. Freezing noncombat pay for three years would save $3 billion per year. The formula for future increases should be adjusted to incorporate allowances and benefits, saving an additional $5 billion a year.
Another $4 billion to $6 billion annually could be saved by reasonable increases in annual health insurance premiums for military retirees of working age. Those premiums — currently $460 per family — have been frozen for the past 15 years while health care costs soared.
All told, these changes would save about $20 billion annually or more than $200 billion over the next 12 years.
Yeah. Cutting soldier pay won’t be as easy to demagogue as the Ryan plan to end Medicare. Those cuts are never gonna happen.
August J. Pollak
It would be funny if they just took Walker’s speeches– I mean, verbatim– and just replace a few words.
Corner Stone
Yeah, because IBM is paying people to tote firearms around all day and wonder which of their buddies are going to get it next.
And yes, I know they were talking about clerical positions, etc but it still goes to how ridiculous stats like this one are.
TooManyJens
I am so tired of this argument. Yes, the private sector has gotten so bad that now historically-crappy public sector pay has caught up. So of course the response of our overlords is that public sector (or in this case, military) pay has to go even further down the crapper.
Phyllis
I wonder what percentage of the NY Times operating budget goes for employee compensation?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
but the SOFA ends in December, and we pretty much hafta leave.
That will shave maybe 50 million a day off of the current 100 million dollar per day expense for A-stan and Iraq.
And i just got a letter last week from the President reiterating that the A-stan drawn down starts in July.
;)
and presumeable we will terminate all
contractormercenary contracts.That should save some $.
Mattminus
What don’t you understand about shared sacrifice, libtards!?!?!?!?
EconWatcher
Isn’t the real waste in the weapons we’re still buying and maintaining in case we have to fight the nonexistent Soviet Union?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Really? Salaries have increased that much over the 12 years I have been out of the Navy? As an E-5, managing half a dozen people, I made so little my wife and son were on WIC. Managing half a dozen people now earns me about 4 times that much salary.
soonergrunt
I wouldn’t be against a pay freeze in principle. We had one for two years in the first Bush admin during the draw down.
But whose base pay is $5,000 more than their civilian counterparts? It ain’t nobody I know.
I also don’t have a problem with Tricare For Life (the insurance for active duty retirees) having a small increase, or even Tricare Standard and Tricare Prime (the two insurance plans for active military and their dependents) seeing a reasonable increase.
Yes, military personnel have to buy separate healthcare insurance. The healthcare is only free for the actual servicemember, and then only to a certain point.
You want to cut defense spending without actually damaging military readiness? Cancel the next aircraft carrier and the entire F-35 program. Any F-16s or F-15s that actually need replacing can be replaced with new-build F-15 and F-16 aircraft. Reflag an armored brigade as a light infantry brigade, and remove all US military forces from Europe, Japan, and Korea.
It ain’t hard at all.
NobodySpecial
@EconWatcher: But, but, but, TANKS!
reflectionephemeral
I really, really hate the idea of cutting pay, for the reasons Corner Stone (they work really hard, in dangerous conditions) and TooManyJens (just ’cause everyone in the bottom 90%’s wages have fallen doesn’t mean military pay should fall more) bring up.
What’s more, there’s plenty of other areas to cut in defense. At this NYT widget, you can scale back some weapons programs, and stop occupying so many foreign countries, and save quite a bit of money.
Maybe someone better at math than the NYT can convince me otherwise, but I really don’t think that cutting pay should be one of our top 15 approaches to saving on defense.
EDITED TO ADD: Or, what soonergrunt said.
PeakVT
The Pentagon’s civilian work force, currently 650,000, should be cut by up to 10 percent, saving more than $7 billion a year.
And what, specifically, is it that the 65,000 people who are to be cut are currently doing that won’t need to be done in the future?
Could it be that the WaPo just arbitrarily pulled 10% out of its ass? “Well, that’s a nice looking number, and it came out so easily…”
cathyx
@EconWatcher: But that money goes to the defense contractors. Those overpaid soldiers are costing the US a lot of money. And they can take early retirement too, if they live long enough. We should raise the age of that also.
srv
I can just hear it now:
KEEP GUBIMENT OUT OF MY TRICARE!
Draylon Hogg
@2
It’s an occupational hazard for volunteer cannon fodder.
Joey Maloney
O/t, Bradley Manning is going to be moved from Quantico to the pretrial detention unit at Leavenworth, where it is intimated he will have a much easier time of it.
Glenn Greenwald says he and FDL are the proximate catalysts of this change.
Discuss, he said, as he tossed the skunk into the center of the garden party.
Zifnab
And why aren’t disabled veterans paying more for the excellent service they receive at the VA. Comparable premiums at a private insurance company for individuals involved in combat operations overseas is WAY more than $460. Perhaps we should just scrap the entire VA system and outsource it to an efficient private firm capable of reigning in all those high medical costs.
The Republic of Stupidity
I read that yesterday and almost punched my computer… but that would have been taking it out on someone/thing not responsible for the matter, eh?
Save $20BB/yr?
Lemme do ‘teh math’ here, if you don’t mind…
If the Fed budget is $3.5TT, and I believe it’s actually more like $3.8TT, cutting $20BB/yr would represent just about a .6% savings on the year…
Oh yeah… the Times is clearly SERIOUS about saving money…
sukabi
But after years of lagging far behind, military pay is now more than $5,000 a year higher than comparable civilian employment, more than $10,000 a year higher when special allowances and benefits are counted.
suuuuuuure it is…. does anyone here know if the military still hands out the “your pay and benefits per year are worth “this amount” information sheet?
20+ years ago you’d get a breakdown of your “pay and benefits” they’d include things that you never saw (and never would see) in calculating what your “compensation” was worth… so while an enlisted soldier’s base pay + baq + overseas or hazard allowances would still put them well below the poverty level and they were eligible for food stamps, the “compensation sheet” would inform the soldier that their compensation amounted to tens of thousands of dollars more than they would actually ever see… things included were commissary & PX privileges (which was a joke, especially after the commissaries & PXs were turned over to private enterprises to stock and run–prices went through the roof)
Proudhon
One way to handle the demagoguery that would accompany an attempt to cut military pay is to implement a steep combat/non-combat differential. The ratio of combat to non-combat troops is lower than ever and continues to decrease.
It’s also clear that civilian staffing levels (the Pentagon will need to become the Hexagon if current trends continue) are way too heavy compared to most US corporations and even most USG agencies (HHS and the IRS come to mind). If we ran the Pentagon as a business, parking spaces would be a lot easier to find.
NonyNony
@PeakVT:
I wonder – if you rolled the Air Force back into the Army how many now “redundant” officer positions could you cut?
Because having a separate Air Force doesn’t make any sense, and I’d like to see an analysis of what kinds of cost savings we could get as taxpayers if we just put the Air Force back to being the Army Air Corps. I’ll bet the savings would be fairly substantial – especially because the guys at the top would now be considering the whole budget and not the budget for air operations separate from the rest of the operations.
nathaniel
How about this don’t pay contract admin people with less than 8 years of experience over 90,000 a year. I know someone who is getting this much from DoD.
Hell government wide let’s not try to contract out so many functions that should be inherently governmental. We are creating incentives, especially in the intelligence field which mostly falls under DoD, to leave federal service only to do the same job at a lot higher cost to the government as a contractor.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@NonyNony: I agree, except the branch should be split between the Army and Navy. Same goes for the Marines (ducks).
PeakVT
@NonyNony: I’m all for it.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Shhh! One service at a time.
Joe Beese
@EconWatcher:
ha ha ha ha ha….
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110216/ap_on_re_us/us_gates_iraq
Martin
@PeakVT: 650,000 civilians for 1.5M active duty? And it’s the active duty guys that are are also doing most of the maintenance, service, clerical, and procurement work – so the civilians are in addition to those guys. That’s fucked up. I have no problem with the VA staffing, but we really don’t need 50,000 people out there pushing paperwork for the next 5 proposed but will never be funded weapons systems.
PurpleGirl
@nathaniel: Don’t you understand that privatizing makes things more efficient and cheaper and better… the Republicans have been telling us this about all government jobs for decades. Why don’t you believe them?
Martin
@Joe Beese: Wait, you’re pissed off about the 150 military that are going to remain in Iraq?
Just Some Fuckhead
@TooManyJens:
Yes, because private sector pay has to go down again. This leveling is what the global economy always promised. If you’re not one of the 1 percenters, you’re ultimately competing for a job with someone that will work for a bag of rice.
NonyNony
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Navy’s already got their own air support – is there something the Air Force supplies to the Navy that they’re not already supplying for themselves?
And I ask this in all honesty because my understanding is that the Navy never makes use of the Air Force at all while the Army is somewhat more dependent on them for their operations. I’ll admit I could well be wrong about that.
JohnR
“comparable civilian employment,”
I never realized that working at McDonald’s was so damn dangerous. I mean, I know the drive-thru windows can see a certain amount of gun-play, but I thought they got hazardous duty-bonuses for that.
What in God’s name are they smoking here? The best “comparable civilian employment” would be Xeen, or whatever Blackwater is choosing to call itself now (Xylem? Xan? Xanth? I can never remember). Is their pay that much less than the USArmy? That’s just begging to be bitch-slapped by The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market.
Villago Delenda Est
How about not bothering to build a few carrier groups? Or just allowing a few to be decommissioned?
Also, how about mothballing all the B2s that were designed to penetrate now 20 years gone Soviet airspace?
Personnel costs are not that sexy, which is why it’s easy to look at them for cuts, as opposed to shit like weapons systems no one in the military wants but are built in key congressional districts.
Make the asshole executives at General Dynamics, Boeing, and other teat sucking contractors feel some fuckin’ pain for a change.
sukabi
@Just Some Fuckhead: If you’re not one of the 1 percenters, you’re ultimately competing for a job with someone that will work for a bag of rice.
Seeing this on some of the online “jobs aggregators” for creative services… jobs posted, minimal compensation offered and people from Pakistan, India, Romania, China, US, Mexico, UK all “competing”… wheeee!
Villago Delenda Est
@Proudhon:
You don’t understand the importance of logistics, and keeping people in uniform to handle it, as opposed to contracting it out to Dick Cheney’s cronies, right?
People bitch about tooth to tail ratios, but one of the reasons Gulf War I was such an overwhelming success was that huge tail supporting the teeth.
Martin
@NonyNony: Air Force provides logistics and intel. They run the air tankers and AWACs.
Montysano
Per the MP3 audio at this link, we spend $20B per year for air conditioning for tents in Afghanistan. I’m not recommending that we let the troops swelter; we should obviously just get the fuck out. Iraq and Afghanistan are little more than corporate soshulism for military contractors.
Xecky Gilchrist
PERSONNEL Pay and benefits account for nearly half of the basic Pentagon budget.
Nice sidestep! As others have pointed out, the article goes on to assume that’s the only half that can be hacked at.
Still, it’s progress that tax raises and military spending cuts are no longer heresy, just being demagogued and weaseled around. Keep this up, and maybe some actual progressive stuff can get done.
Joe Beese
@Martin:
No, just amused by the idiots who claim that Obama has “ended” the Iraq War.
His promise to have all troops out by the end of the year is – as the link shows – yet another lie for consumption by the gullible.
Martin
@Villago Delenda Est: True, but I think the military should go all-in on logistics and let the lethal and exotic systems procurement slide for a while. It’s got to help all around if we can keep that fighting force in action with less work in the tail. Shit, just improving fuel efficiency by 20% is 20% fewer tankers you need to drive and protect getting from wherever you’re sourcing your fuel to the front lines.
Martin
@Joe Beese: So reducing from 140,000 guys with guns to 150 guys with training manuals means that Obama lied. You’re really determined to be disappointed.
NonyNony
@JohnR:
Yes that would be stupid. Except that the editorial specifically says “freezing NONCOMBAT pay”. They’re not talking about the guys getting shot at, they’re talking about the desk jockeys in middle management at the Pentagon or Wright-Patterson or Charleston.
Joel
Alternatively, we could push for civilian pay to be higher…
PeakVT
@Martin: First, there’s no reason for active duty personnel doing to be doing clerical or procurement work, as that’s a big waste of the expensive training most military personnel receive. The civilian staff should be doing all of the boring work that doesn’t get deployed if the troops do. Second, your post sounds like a wastenfraud rant from a right-winger. “Look at how many people there are, there must be tons of waste!” Maybe there is, but until it is identified, calls for arbitrary cuts to eliminate it are just handwaving.
@PeakVT: NYT, not WaPo.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Joe Beese: doesn’t matter.
We have to leave.
Your link is purely for bubba consumption.
NonyNony
@Martin:
If you haven’t figured out by now what Joe Beese is doing I don’t know what to tell you.
He’s either DougJ trolling us all or a Republican ratfucker wannabe. If he’s truly a liberal who’s disappointed with Obama he’s one of the saddest individuals on the planet.
maus
FIFY.
soonergrunt
@Martin: that’s 650,000 DoD civilians in addition to 3.5 million active, reserve, national guard for all components. The Army alone is 1.2 million personnel at full full mobilized strength. Funny enough, a lot of those DoD civilian positions (contractors, too, come to that) are reservists/national guard.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
take away combat pay, and the other things associated with war, and are soldiers are still paid diddly/squat.
other than that i am pro defense cuts all the way.
300 billion dollars a year, and we would still be spending as much as the next 5 nations combined. in any sane universe, that would be enough.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Villago Delenda Est:
According to Wiki, the US currently has HALF of the carriers in service around the world… in other words, we currently have as many carriers afloat as the rest of the world combined…
Strangely enough… the Italians are one of the few countries w/ more than 1…
Something odd about that… sounds like a a gag line in search of a joke…
But I digress…
Seeing as we only have 11 carriers currently in operation, we wouldn’t want to get caught short in an emergency, would we?
soonergrunt
@NonyNony: The idea is that the Navy, which has nukes, would get control of the ICBMs and the B-2 bombers. The Army would get control of just about everything else.
I don’t necessarily want to see the USAF done away with. Just returned to their rightful place, subordinate to the Army.
Keenanjay
There is too small a sample of veterans in this thread though many of the remarks are good.
Our soldiers are well compensated, but there is no appropriate pay for being under fire. For that, the best we can do is combat pay and tax relief. Most soldiers don’t enlist for the pay, mostly it’s the unknown – how will I react to danger. That and education money. If you feel I’m wrong about the compensation, I suggest you go back to what we earned in the Carter years, just after Vietnam to see what shitty pay was like.
I work with officers, senior enlisted retirees and retired officers like myself. We’re all doing pretty fucking well and I’ll be the first to admit that with free TRICARE and a small (tax-deductable) supplement that I’m in tall cotton. It would only be fair to raise our deductables to where they should have been if adjusted for inflation.
Government civilians and soldiers cost more than contractors because of the retirement benefits that have to be funded, not to mention the lifetime medical care. The reason contractors got out of hand was that under the Bushies contracting ran wild and it became a big give away to friends of Cheney, et al.
Yes, I suck at the government teat. But I’m honest enough and knowledgeable enough to know that many programs should be killed. I also know that the great majority of soldiers never sees combat or combat conditions, though the Army has been taking a pounding in recent years.
An please, don’t get carried away by the self-serving mythology the military creates around itself of the “noble warrrior,” there are plenty of slackers who never serve a difficult tour in their careers. I work on an Air Force base, so I see it all the time.
cleek
why, that’s 2.8% of the current budget!
dramatic!
rea
I would propose paying our active duty military $1 million a year apiece. If we make them all millionaires, the Republicans will decide they are worth the money.
cleek
@Martin:
i think the issue is that Gates says the admin wants to have more than that 150.
srv
@The Republic of Stupidity: And we have to worry about all the Chinese carriers.
soonergrunt
@Keenanjay:
Pretty much. I know guys who’ve been on their 4th or 5th year-long tour of Iraq/Afg, and guys who’ve never deployed in the same amount of time, and that’s in the Army. I also know guys in the Air Force (I work on a AF base, too) that think their four-month tour to an air-conditioned base 500 miles from the fight, with a beer allotment and shift work is source material for a war novel.
You can just see him looking at his office-mate’s paper cut, and shaking his head sadly and saying “damn this war!”
Paul in KY
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): They are probably talking about officer salaries.
Martin
@The Republic of Stupidity: It’s worse than that actually. Those 11 are effectively all supercarriers, of which the rest of the world has maybe 2. I think Russia has one and I think China is trying to get one into service. If you look at the size of most other carriers, they’re really about the size of our amphibious carriers, where we have another 12 or 14 – something like that.
We need to find a way to recharge NATO for their operation as it’s clear that they at the very least (and toss in Japan, Taiwan, and a mountain of other countries) are all relying on the US having a carrier group somewhere that they can rely on. The reason Libya started with is is we had two carrier groups there. We had one off of Japan to provide humanitarian assistance after the tsunami. They’re really handy things to have, and we’re happy to share, but but a little extra coin to offset that global service would be nice. Fuck, it doesn’t even need to be direct – just shove the trade deficit a bit more in our direction. Some jobs and the resulting taxation would be all I ask for.
Paul in KY
@Joey Maloney: Way to go, Glenn!
Skippy-san
Something to think about. The NYT will get blamed as a “liberal fantasy” for printing this-but I’ll bet if you pulled the string you find someone in DOD gave them the idea for these cuts. DOD during Bush and subsequent loathes paying people and whines repeatedly about the “burden” military medical care and retirement are to their budget. If this got enacted they would be cheering.
Paul in KY
@NonyNony: I can tell you that the non-combat people (and there are alot of them, and some of them get very, very close to ‘combat’) will be really, really pissed if their pay is froze & those in the combat AFSCs/MOSes keep gettin the raises.
eemom
@Joey Maloney:
I heard it was because the Quantico tow truck drivers all threatened to quit if they had to deal with Jane Hamsher again.
The Republic of Stupidity
@srv:
All
onenone of them?In defense of the Chinese, they are working on ONE old Soviet carrier that will be operational soon…
Martin
@Keenanjay:
I disagree. If our soldiers were well compensated, then the demographics of the military would to some degree resemble the demographics of the nation. They don’t. They’re not even close. One of the core principles of modern liberalism is that when you get some service group which is non-representative of those who they serve, then you get social and political friction – which is what we have now.
The republicans are all too happy to ‘support the troops’ so long as that support is emotional. As soon as it comes time to treat their injuries, they’re too expensive, they’re freeloaders, etc. And they’re all too happy to send them into harms way because what the fuck do they care – it’s not their kids out there. They don’t mind a bunch of minorities getting shot up.
Now, changing the pay rates isn’t necessarily the solution, but something there needs work because by all appearances military service is too often a path of last resort for many people rather than a chosen career. Ultimately, that’s going to blow up on us because we’re going to get starved for leadership in the ranks.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Martin:
That would be nice… considering how much we’re spending annually to keep all of that working and how much certain countries around the world rely on us to solve their problems for them…
sukabi
@PeakVT: wow, you’ve never been in the military — and it shows… things were a LOT more cost effective when the military was doing most of it’s own paper pushing / laundry / supply requisitions / meal prep / plus it provided ACTUAL job skills for those leaving the service…
how many tank drivers / infantry positions / combat positions are there in the civilian workforce, and how does the training for those jobs get you employed once you leave the service?
soonergrunt
@Joey Maloney: He wants to take credit for moving PFC Manning 1,100+ miles from his lawyers?
Well, he’s nearer to his dad, anyway, and that just has to warm the cockles of some hearts around here.
Manning’s new digs at the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: just gettin’ out of Iraq and A-stan will save 36 billion per year.
catclub
I am not sure I get their math. they say personnell costs are 1/2 of the defense budget, so if defense is $700B/yr then personnel is $350B. Then they say that personnel can be cut 10%, which should be $35B/yr, but they only say it is $7B/year.
How does a 10% cut of a $350B slice only work out to $7B?
Did they borrow McMegan’s calculator?
JRon
I don’t understand. If military pay is 5k higher than private sector, why are all those guys on my flights back from Dubai talking about how much more money they make since they left the service to become contractors?
Does the nyt have a different definition of “comparable” than other people?
HyperIon
@cathyx wrote:
Speaking of contractors, my mom’s most vehement complaint these days is that when she goes to the commissary, the parking lot is full of contractor vehicles.
She about lost it the other day when she noticed that the guard on the MacDill main gate was a contractor.
srv
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Just the beginning – we must embolden our Navy to deal with this growing red menace.
Operational, as in runs off the coast one weekend a year like their submarine fleet does.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: 36 billion > 20 billion.
Just get out of A-stan and Iraq and we won’t have to cut soldiers pay at all.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
If we do that, we won’t need them at all. And then who is going to drive our shiny war machine around the middle east?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Just Some Fuckhead: give em jobs patrolling the border and building schools here instead of in A-stan.
we could use some roads and light rails too.
Charity begins at home, right?
I think american taxpayers deserve more for 100 million dollars a day than more Taliban and more atrocities.
;)
JRon
A couple years ago, the DoD was paying the same for 5,000 contractors as for 20,000 troops. Still having trouble seeing how military salaries could be 5k higher…
NonyNony
@catclub:
They suggest 10% of the civilian staff, not 10% of the whole enchilada. So that suggests that the Pentagon is spending $70B of its budget on civilian staff.
They also say that “pay and benefits” account for 1/2 the defense budget but they appear to be dishonestly wrapping up the benefits received by military retirees with the pay and benefits of current personnel in their numbers. I would definitely want to see those broken out – a decent fix to health care system could save the government a huge amount of money that is currently being paid out for retirees who don’t qualify for Medicare.
noodler
Gates has already gone through the services and COCOMS finding effeciencies and cuts, NYT does not even mention this, USMC is downsizing, and then there is the just announced Roles and Missions Review – suspect we’ll see no movement before that is complete. I cna agree to what NYT wrote about trimming CSG’s and airwings though – things that hopefully the RMR will point out.
NonyNony
@JRon:
It’s easy when everybody else’s average wages have tanked.
This is also why there’s a push to drive up resentment against public workers in general. It used to be that public workers got paid shit compared to private sector but had better job security. With wages going into the crapper public sector workers have better job security AND their wages work out as being better too. Makes it easy to whip up resentment from people who have less.
Having said that – remember that it’s an average. That means that the guys at the bottom could still be making crap wages if the guys at the top are doing much better than average. And the military brass are not low-paid schlubs.
dmbeaster
Here is the money quote out of the editorial:
Why not return defense spending to 2001 levels, adjusted for inflation? Is the War on Terror so difficult that it required that level of expansion of military spending from pre-existing astronomical levels?
Our priorities concerning defense spending are grossly out of whack, but this article does not help much by emphasizing pay cuts for active duty service personnel. And the claim “they make more than the private sector” seems pulled straight from someone’s lying ass.
artem1s
@nathaniel:
you hit the nail right on the head. after 3 years of service the military rehires the same person at a substantially higher rate of pay to do the same job as a civilian. usually (as in the case of my sister) they retain their service in the National Guard so they continue to receive quite a lot of their benefits for their 2 weeks a year and then get to retire in 20 years.
now, I am NOT for reducing the administrative staff for exactly this reason. The military doesn’t do without, it just hires privately. almost always it pays substantially more when it does. If you want to cut payroll you have to pay more to service personnel so they stay past their initial 3 years and quit relying on private contractors to do so much of the work.
In addition we need a real analysis of what the military pays private contractors for goods and services. I have no doubt that Haliburton is consistently overcharging simply because there is no real oversight.
but this would require the DOD to actually have a budget and know what it spends its money on.
Villago Delenda Est
@artem1s:
Attempts at oversight of Halliburton were ruthlessly suppressed during the previous malassministration. From the office of the Dark Lord.
Pretty much like attempts to plan for the occupation of Iraq were suppressed by Feldmarschall von Rumsfailed.
PeakVT
@sukabi: First, if you read my comment, you’ll notice I wrote “all of the boring work that doesn’t get deployed if the troops do.” Last time I checked, the military still needs to do laundry and eat and request (not procure) supplies when it’s in the field. Second, got a cite for that assertion on costs? And make sure you’re not referencing material that talks about the cost of contractors, because at no point have I talked about military personnel vs. contractors. Third, outside of few specialties, the military has long recognized that it doesn’t provide much civilian employment training. That’s why education benefits are part of the compensation package, and a heavily-emphasized selling point. If the US had a universal service requirement, on-the-job training would make sense, but the US has an all-volunteer force. There’s no reason to complicate the military’s missions by requiring it to make sure that every soldier it discharges has spent time sufficient time in a position that has civilian relevance. The missions of combat, peace-keeping, nation-building, and occasional disaster relief are already more than enough.
Ruckus
Here’s the base monthly pay for the military as of Jan 1
This is base pay.
An E-5 with 15yrs service is $2965.50/month = 35478.00/yr
An O-5 with 15yrs service is $7186.20/month = 86234.40/yr
sukabi
@PeakVT: the military still needs to do laundry and eat and request (not procure) supplies when it’s in the field.
most of those tasks have been “outsourced” to firms like KBR, Halliburton and their subsidiaries at a tremendous cost and dubious service provided… (take your pick of the many halliburton links)
the “privatization” of functions from food service to supply procurement, to health care / HMO type services started in earnest back in the late 80’s early 90’s when Cheney was Secretary of Defense… The effect on both the quality of goods (went down) and the cost of goods (went up) was immediate. People most feeling the impact of this shift were the enlisted service members and their families… you know what also went down with these changes? Morale. How do I know? First hand experience on the receiving end of these changes.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: There are a hell of a lot more E-5s than O-5s (as it should be).
E-5 is not that hard a rank to make, if you have competency & stay out of trouble with the law. O-5 is a hard rank to make. The move from O-4 to O-5 is the first really hard hurdle for an officer (IMO).
Ruckus
Are a lot of the contractors doing the actual service jobs making a lot of money? Or are there a number of layers of profit along the way so that what we pay for and what gets paid have a large difference?
Most of the service type duties were done by people with little time in and at low rank or as punishment so the cost would be actually low and even a marginal cost increase would be large. I’ll bet that the person doing the laundry does not get paid a lot more than the military person would have. I would also bet the person/company owning the laundry service does.
Ruckus
@Paul in KY:
Agreed. But I was showing the middle of the ranks for both enlisted and officers for example. If you look at the chart you will see that the pay levels off and stays the same after a number of years. Do you still have to make rank on a regular basis to stay in and retire? I would imagine so, one most likely wouldn’t really want an E-2 with 30yrs in.
And one probably doesn’t need a lot of O-9s either so that means 1/2 way up is O-4 which makes $6851.10/month.
And no E-5 was not that hard to make. I would imaging there is a lot of knee pad work involved in making O-5.
Sloegin
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and the gov’t employees in support of them don’t make dick. That 5k number is pure BS.
Now if we went after all the contractors and MERCENARIES still in our employ, that might make a dent. Put soldiers to work again driving the supply trucks and pulling KP duty.
Villago Delenda Est
The thing about the officer ranks is for the longest time we’ve had as many general officers as we had during WWII. But a lot fewer troops to be in command of.
The fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of chaff above 0-6 that is busy in stuff that is basically makework in case we need a whole lot of 2 stars to command more than the 10 odd active divisions we’ve got now.
When I was in, in the 80’s, there were 16 active divisions, and a handful of reserve divisions. But we still had nearly as many active duty general officers as we had in WWII with an order of magnitude as many active divisions.
These guys are all “supervising” bases, or procurement projects, or weapons development projects, mostly staffed by civilians but you just MUST have an friggin’ general commanding the base, even though they’ve probably got a handful of actual soldiers serving under them, most of them other officers who are engaged in “without troops” assignments that are administrative in nature.
I remember in ’89, when there was so much talk of the “peace dividend”, that rampant personnel cuts of everything BUT general officers were underway on Cheney’s orders. We were assured that the ability of the army to expand in case of national emergency would not be endangered…because we’d still have a shitload of generals on active duty sitting around waiting for divisions to form for them to command.
Kiwanda
Is there any particular reason that the military budget could not be reduced to say, a quarter of its current size? It would still be half again as large as the next largest, China’s. Besides providing a world-wide array of golf courses for generals to play on, what good does it do?
I mean, after the current recession ends, in 2026.
soonergrunt
@Ruckus:
No.
I do work equivalent to a GS-11 in the career field 2210.
The base pay for a GS-11/2210 is $57,407/year + benefits in this locality.
I make $45,007/year + less in benefits. The government pays the prime contractor (I work for the subcontracor, an employee-owned company) $120,000 for my position. The prime pays their people who do my job almost $10k/year LESS than I make.
les
How come nobody questions the premise–we can’t reduce personnel numbers? Maybe that’s true–I don’t really believe it–but it’s simply asserted and left. How many units do we need sitting in Europe awaiting the red hordes? I think we’re way past time to rethink the mission, and reorganize/downsize; but too many entrenched interests to even start.
And not to get in to the fraudenwaste (thanks, whoever above) shit, but a third of the fucking federal budget doesn’t even have an accounting system to tell where it goes? A wholly captured/revolving door procurement system? Billion dollar airplanes that can’t fly in the rain? They oughta try zero based budgeting for a while, and see what happens.
Tom
A few ideas to save some defense money.
How about getting rid of some of the purely ceremonial tasks. Military band members get tax free combat pay while having no combat skills, and require special protection when they play for the commanding general, the embassy staff or foreign dignitaries. We do not need professional musicians to protect America.
Why can’t fighting fires on military bases be done like many other small towns? You don’t need a full time fire department if you staff the firehouse with volunteer firemen.
Why must we spend tax money to have active duty chaplains. They should be part of MWR (moral, welfare and recreation) which is required to be self supporting through users fees. If the local chapel on base can not support itself, I’m sure the major religions in the US won’t mind a little missionary work.
Get rid of the Selective Service System. Not one person drafted in 35 years.
Ruckus
@soonergrunt:
This is a pretty small sample size(1) but this is exactly what I’m talking about. If that was a military person could that job be done by a enlisted person? An E7 with 10 yrs service makes $42656.40 base pay. His pension is higher for sure but his overhead costs day to day would be a lot smaller than yours which is probably in the neighborhood of 20K per year for a total of employee cost of 65-70k and a government cost of $120K. Not a bad profit. Per employee. You have no idea of how much I’d like my business to be able to do that. In another business I used to own I figured that I had to sell $100K per employee @ $25/hr (lots of paid overtime) and 20% material costs to break even. Take out the material costs and we are right there on your cost but $40-50K profit.
And yes the math is ballpark.
Benjamin Cisco
Former AF NCO here, been out for just over 16 years now, and I see nothing has really changed.
__
Any talk of budget costs within the military ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS aims at the troops – never the bloated hardware boondoggles that account for the REAL scratch. Many others in this thread have already stated the obvious here, and I won’t rehash it here. With regards to the article, all I can say is the Old Gray Lady has gone full Koch whore.
sukabi
@Benjamin Cisco: also left unmentioned by the “let’s cut the troops pay” folks is the fact that the DoD (and most of the other gov. depts) haven’t actually balanced their budgets in decades… their “accounting” system is so fubar that the GAO several years ago gave them a D- and said there was no way to do an actual audit to even find out where their money was going… find it hard to believe that anything’s changed wrt that… The pentagon has said in the last several years they couldn’t account for over $1 trillion… that’s quite a hefty sum going to black bag ops and lining peoples’ pockets…
soonergrunt
@Benjamin Cisco: Cancel the F-35 if you want to start saving actual money.
soonergrunt
@Ruckus: You don’t want an E-7 doing desktop IT support. That E-7 is a supervisor, and should be in charge a platoon or its equivalent. I had 35 men under me as an E-7.
The military doesn’t have set IT positions as an MOS for every single position they need. That would be one of those fields where the vast majority of the enlistees would go one and out, and there would have to be huge retention bonuses to keep a cadre. There are uniformed IT people, but nowhere near enough, and most of the ones I work with in the Air Force don’t know their asses from a Cat-6 cable. It’s an extra duty, not a career field, in the Air Force for the most part, and the people who do it have an online course, a three-day classroom course, and a test…and lots and lots of contractors teaching them/doing their jobs for them.
The Department of the Army has already replaced most IT contractors with GS civilian employees, but the Air Force still relies on contractors. Supposedly, the AF is supposed to be changing that over the next couple of years, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m hoping I get the GS-11 position at the VA hospital that I interviewed for last week. Of course, that assumes that the republicans, who hate people who’ve actually served, won’t work hammer and tongs to cut VA’s budget like they usually do.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: I think a better example for officers would have been an O-3 with 10 years of service. That (to me) would be more in line as a ‘Jane Average Officer’ example.
Paul in KY
@soonergrunt: I sure hope you get that position. GS-11 would be sweet!