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• Monday, June 2, 2008 02:59 PM

  @RMP

  Thanks for the article and link. I think you or someone posted it the other day (I've been busy since last Thursday and caught up in a blur, so I'm nto sure who did what when ...); I still have it up in my browser, but your post reminded me to actually read the rest of it.

  I get the idea that I've somehow presented myself, in spite of saying the opposite, as pro-Pentagon or pro-big ticket military spending. I hope you understand that's not the case.

  WRT the Berrigan piece, I'm a bit more hopeful about what it will take to pull the plug on many of these functions. It's happened before, even where the eliminated thing was allegedly indispensable, irreplaceable, absolutely vital to our national security so that (as Glenn says) the enemy doesn't come to Slaughter Us All. There are alternatives to most of these functions (e.g. humanitarian functions back to USAID, diplomatic/proconsul functions back to State, etc. )that have been bureaucratically finagled into the Pentagon hydra, including 'just stop doing it altogether'.

  The hardest thing to weed out will be the 'budget-busting' part, especially where it involves waste. The agreed on estimate is that somewhere around a third of the acquisitions budget is wasted; everyone knows it, no one knows how to fix it. Beyond the waste, things are complicated and entangled; it's crazy that it's sometimes easier to completely replace an aircraft before its EOL than to maintain or upgrade it, but that's the kind of thing that budget hatcheteers face. The $900 hammers are just the low hanging fruit, and don't much affect the overall picture.

  —quickstrategy Read quickstrategy's other letters
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