The US military budget is way out of proportion to our national budget, our needs as a country and the threats that confront us. In fact, the military budget may be the greatest single threat to the future of the United States. We now spend well over $700 billion a year on “defense,” more than the rest of the world (including our allies) combined, or nearly so. The US military budget dwarfs education, health care, and other social needs. In light of this, the DOD's plan to save $100 Billion over five years is paltry and largely insignificant.

US citizens need to be asking why it is that we take such good care of the military with our taxes and such minimal care of our citizens in need. We currently spend more than $50 billion a year on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, weapons that cannot be used without destroying ourselves in the process. If we wanted to be serious about reducing the military budget, we could start with abandoning plans to modernize our nuclear arsenal for $80 billion over the next 10 years and improving delivery systems for nuclear weapons for $100 billion over 10 years. In fact, we should be asking ourselves in a serious way why we need nuclear weapons at all, and wouldn't we be far better off leading the way to a world without these weapons.

For roughly $50 billion annually we could assure that the United Nations meets its eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015 to reduce poverty, disease, childhood and maternal mortality, etc. We would have far less need for a bloated, oversized and largely ineffective military if we reached out to the world with anti-poverty measures rather than predator drones and wars of choice.

Yesterday, the Congressional Research Service sent legislators its attempt at nailing down what Secretary Gates's efficiencies might actually be worth. The full report is online here and key points follow:

"The largest savings appear likely to come from a 30% reduction over three years in funding for 'service support contractors.'... [but] There appears to be some significant overlap in the proposals, so their impact may not be cumulative..... Aside from the overlaps, several of the initiatives involve only relatively small amounts.... Many of the potentially larger savings appear to involve scrubbing the recent very large increases in intelligence spending."

My thanks to expert blogger Winslow Wheeler for pointing this link out to me.

"Nobody is suggesting cuts of that size yet." I knew I was nobody. I guess this confirms that.

Despite the front page stories in all of our major newspapers and the bold headlines in the media, Gates’ announcement this week was, at best, really much ado about nothing. At worst, it gave the false impression that after 13 years of real growth in the regular defense budget, which saw it almost double in real terms, Gates would finally bring defense spending under control.

Essentially Gates claimed that he would save substantial sums by closing the Joint Forces Command, cutting some 50 flag officers, and slicing the number of contractors by 10 percent a year for the next three years. Really?

The Joint Forces Command costs $240 million a year to operate and employs 2,800 people. If Gates closes it and fires all 2,800, the Pentagon could save $240 million. But according to Gates most of these people will be given new jobs, including General Ray Odierno, who will take over the command in September and will close it down.

Cutting 50 flag officers could save at most $13 million a year. But even that small number assumes that the overall size of the force will be reduced by 50. Most likely 50 less people will be promoted from O-6 to flag and general officer each year.

To cut the contractors by 10 percent assumes Gates knows how many contractors there are; but he admits he does not. Moreover, the several hundred thousand contractors in the war zones will be exempt from the reduction.

But, however miniscule the savings will be, the real problem is that the coverage of Gates’ announcement gives the American people and financial officials around the world the impression that the defense budget, the third largest part of the federal budget, will play a part in reducing the huge and growing federal deficits that, according to Gates and Admiral Mullen, are jeopardizing our national security. On the contrary, Gates wants the regular defense budget to continue to grow in real terms and plans to plow these savings back into funding weapons systems, many of which even he agrees have no place in dealing with today’s threats.

Updated at 11:00 a.m.

All of us weighing in here and elsewhere on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ Monday announcement of moves to improve the efficiency of his department have focused on the wrong point. Will his proposal to shutter JFCOM negatively affect the Norfolk area? Possibly in the short run, but this may be better than what will happen to that area in the long run if defense budget cuts force a curtailing of construction of nuclear attack submarines or aircraft carriers. But to respond to the question more broadly, it is not important whether or not Secretary Gates' proposed steps will actually save significant amounts of money – I have argued elsewhere that as presently defined they will not. Nor is it important whether this signals a significant change in the Department's “culture of endless money” – which I doubt, unless Gates commits to retaining his office at least through Obama’s entire term. Was his idea for insourcing private sector work smart? No, as he now himself admits. We can applaud his current efforts, laud him as an agent of change, if possible and move on to the more important subject: strategy.

We should not criticize the Secretary’s current efficiency proposals but rather examine the logic process that got him to his Monday proposals. In essence, rather than starting with the conclusions and criticizing them, we need to read him “from right to left,” starting with his assumptions and then proceeding through is argument about what is required before getting to the need for efficiency in DoD and, finally, specific ideas. Secretary Gates provided this logic trail in his press conference but as such things inevitably play out, he started with the conclusions and only got to the strategic analysis later in the discussion.

What is significant is how Secretary Gates got to the point of pressing for increased efficiency in DoD. It is based on a true strategic analysis, one that starts with an assessment of the threat, evaluates the required U.S. military responses to that threat, defines a set of desired capabilities and then establishes the resource level needed to acquire and maintain those capabilities. Over the past several years, practically every defense expert I know has complained about the absence of true strategy in the U.S. approach to national security planning. Well, folks, here it is.

First, the Secretary believes that the threat to national security is growing, not declining, and becoming more complex. He sees a more unstable world, more failed and failing states and countries that are investing heavily in their militaries such as Iran. North Korea and China. He also sees new kinds of threats emerging from cyber to precision ballistic and cruise missiles. In essence, we have more challengers, and more ways of being challenged and a number of the challengers are getting stronger even as some in this country are proposing that we cut defense spending and our forces.

Second, he believes that the for the most part the U.S. military is properly sized for the challenges we face. It must be a fill-spectrum force, forward deployed and able to marshal a massive response to major humanitarian or military challenges as they emerge. There needs to be additional rebalancing, both to support irregular warfare and to prepare for emerging peer competitors, but that is to be expected. The Secretary also clearly stated his support for key modernization programs including the Joint Strike Fighter, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, new ships, the tanker, next-generation long-range strike and the new ground-combat vehicle for the Army.

Third, he believes that the current level of defense spending reflected in the base budget along with 2-3 percent real growth is what is necessary to maintain that force and modernize it over time. Given the documented growth rate of “entitlement” spending within the defense budget, a 2-3 percent growth rate for the overall budget will actually mean a reduction in the amount of resources available for acquisition over that same time period. This is one reason he wants to promote efficiency within DoD.

This logic train led him to the next point: the availability of resources. As he said in the press conference “My greatest worry is that we will do to the defense budget what we have done four times before, and that is slash it in an effort to find some kind of a dividend to put the money someplace else. I think that would be disastrous in the world environment we see today and what we’re likely to see in the years to come. If you were to graph the defense budget going back the last 40 or 50 years, it would look like the EKG of a fibrillating heart. What we need is modest, sustainable growth over a prolonged period of time that allows us to make sensible investment decisions, and not have these giant increases and giant decreases that make efficiency and doing acquisition in a sensible way almost impossible.”

There it is in a nutshell; a complete strategic concept in a single paragraph.

Secretary Gates went on to state that he is doubtful about his ability to sustain the proposed one percent growth rate in defense spending, at least without demonstrating a serious effort to make the Department more efficient. Even if he can do this, rising overhead costs, as he said, will “eat his lunch.” Thus, there is a need for greater efficiency in order to protect the procurement accounts. Hence, now completing our right to left journey, we arrive at his current efforts to reduce DoD overhead costs.

So, I will take this opportunity to apologize to Secretary Gates for being less supportive than I should have been of his efforts to reform his department. Those who want to take issue with his initiatives would best do so either by seeking to challenge his logic train or, better still, by accepting his argument but identifying better ways to make DoD more efficient so that there is less need to reduce defense spending which will mean cutting real military capabilities.

Let me conclude by taking my own admonition to heart and recommending one area where more could be done to make DoD efficient. This is by greatly expanding the role of performance-based logistics (PBL). One way of changing DoD’s culture and improve the stability of the acquisition process is by forcing it to take the costs of sustainment serious and make life cycle cost management a central, dare I say leading, part of acquisition planning. The Secretary has already admitted that his insourcing initiative was a failure. He should take the next step and embrace PBL. A key to the PBL concept is long-term contracts. DoD budgeteers hate this because it does not allow them total flexibility in managing their money. To which I respond, tough. This is a cultural artifact that needs to be change. The U.K. Ministry of Defense is a shining example of such a cultural change; it embraced PBL as a necessity. For example, there is a twenty-five year PBL contract with Boeing for the sustainment of the British CH-47 fleet. There are ways of building into PBL contracts incentives for overall reductions in the cost of sustainment as well as for a sharing of dollar savings between industry and government. If the Secretary wants real efficiency improvements as well as a change in culture, let him embrace PBL. As a next step, for example, the Secretary could tell the Air Force to reverse its decision to insource C-17 sustainment.

Secretary Gates has entered into a much larger debate that goes well beyond the defense budget. We as a country need to take a very hard look at our debt, deficits, and overall budgets with a keen and creative eye toward a sustainable and secure future. Entitlements will be at the debate table. Defense will also be there. Just about all of our mandatory and discretionary expenditures should be open to discussion. The time for the tough decisions is upon us and we need to be wise, fair, and keep an eye on the long run, not just short run political expediency.

We are as a nation living off some giant credit cards that are only partly being paid for. We have a powerful and rich economy and a hard working people. But we cannot expect those people, the taxpayers, to bear the inevitably huge burdens if this overall inertia of budgetary injudiciousness continues unabated. We can also not rely in the long run on the Chinese, the Saudis, the countries of the EU and others to help us pay our bills via purchases of our debt. By the way we also pay these countries and citizens of these countries huge interest payments each year. Treasury bills are now a form of credit card for the US, the most indebted country on the planet. Please see: http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/mfh.txt, http://www.usdebtclock.org/.

The defense budget, oddly enough, has always been an easier target than entitlements. But with the long term financial imbalances that we are likely to face given the dysfunctional nature of the decisions making apparatus at many levels, the emotionally charged tradeoffs we see today could end up being far more charged and far more difficult to face the longer we effectively politically doddle and kick the billions down the road.

Every moment we wait to solve the budgetary problems we face increased interest payments and increased political and other difficulties in dealing with these issues at the “logical moments”. These moments are when we are not pushed to the wall and letting some degree of panic set in. That is when overreactions happen. We don’t need these.

Also, not dealing with the budgetary situation soon will likely lead to significant increases in taxes. This could harm business and other investments. The threat of these taxes could be slowing down some investments today. People without jobs take note. People who are risk of losing their jobs take note. Well, everyone take note. This will effect just about everyone.

I agree with Edmund Phelps of Columbia when he points out that the real unemployment problem we face today is increasingly structural (the types of jobs available do not fit the training and education of many in the work force) and we need to get inventing, innovating, and training and educating our people better. Our work force needs investment as well in order for it to link up properly with the economy.

The more we wait the greater the chance there will be of increasing crowding out. This is an economist term for the government expenses literally crowding out financial and other investments that need to be, and otherwise could have been made. These are very big issues and this is a no-kidding serious problem for the future of the country.

Secretary Gates made an initial shot across the bow. However, he and others in the know understand that this is just the beginning of the debate. Senators and others with power and interests will get involved. Lobbyists are already in motion on some of these issues. Local constituencies and others with personal and financial interests will also get involved.

It is hard to predict where all of this will go in the future. One thing is certain, however, if we don’t start thinking better and acting more responsibly with our public finances the country could be in much worse economic shape, and for a very long time, in the not exactly long term future.

National security is not ensured, protected and developed just by DOD. National security requires a full-country approach, not just the “all-government approach”, which has become a shop-worn cliché rather quickly. The US economy, its labor force, investors, entrepreneurs, teachers, inventors, and just about everyone else is involved. Without a strong economy and a strong hopeful people with jobs that matter and give some sense of dignity we could be walking into a very uncertain future indeed.

I attended the defense secretary's Monday press conference and a subsequent private meeting in which he elaborated on his thinking about the need for greater efficiency in military spending. Secretary Gates correctly detects that bipartisan support is coalescing for defense cuts, and that political sentiment for military savings could grow into the kind of avalanche that buried the joint force after Vietnam and the Cold War. Gates believes his department can live within flat or slightly rising defense budgets in the years ahead if it can find $100 billion in savings during the 2012-2016 period to cover the rising costs of military modernization. Achieving such savings would also send a message to Congress that the Pentagon is capable of cutting waste without help from outsiders -- help that often has the perverse effect of making waste worse.

Secretary Gates is a sincere man, and his proposed savings are laudable. But like many people in the defense establishment, he does not appear to grasp how serious the government's current fiscal crisis is. Two days after his press conference, the Treasury disclosed that the government ran a deficit of $165 billion in July. That's right -- it spent an average of five billion dollars every day that it did not have, and therefore had to borrow. So far in this fiscal year, the government has spent about $3 trillion while collecting $1.8 trillion in tax receipts, which means 40 percent of the budget was borrowed.

Against this fiscal backdrop, the expectation that defense spending can remain stable in the years ahead seems very unrealistic. Military expenditures are the biggest discretionary component of federal spending, claiming over a fifth of the entire budget. The notion that they can be held constant while other components of federal spending are cut disproportionately to balance the budget is impractical and apolitical. A purely arithmetic approach yields a very different conclusion: if 40 percent of the federal budget is being borrowed, then the logical path to living within our means is for all major federal accounts to be cut by roughly that amount -- a process that would take defense spending down from $700 billion per year to $400 billion.

Nobody is suggesting cuts of that size yet. But the prevailing view within the Pentagon -- that entitlements are the place to go for deficit reduction -- is naive. Does anybody beyond the five-sided building seriously believe entitlements will be cut 40 percent or more to achieve a balanced budget? How much progress has the Pentagon made in restraining the growth of military entitlements?

Voters care much more about their Social Security and Medicare payments than they do about bringing peace to Afghanistan. The political system senses that, and it isn't favorably disposed to raising taxes in the midst of what may well become a protracted, double-dip recession. So when Mr. Gates says that America's military may need to do even more in the years ahead around the world to compensate for the falling defense outlays of our European allies, he is just showing how out of touch he is with domestic political trends. There is no reason why the United States -- five percent of the world's population -- should be sustaining 50 percent of global military outlays, especially at a time when its economy is rapidly losing ground to the economies of other nations.

By his own estimate, Secretary Gates cut $330 billion from future weapons spending last year. We need to see similar cuts in force structure and personnel costs, mainly by removing people from the system. Gates says that any cuts in force structure will make America less safe, but right now the biggest threat to our future is the possibility of federal insolvency. So unless the defense secretary and his advisors become more realistic about the role the Pentagon must play in balancing the federal budget, they can look forward to a non-stop stream of congressional cuts in defense spending during the coming years.

My direct experience of the Defense Department in all its manifestations is close to nil. Except for a couple of days 'consulting' back in the dark ages, I have entered its portals only to speak with people. I know its works, of course, but not its workings.

So, I'd be indebted to anyone who can describe to me how roughly 9,000 persons are actually employed in a command center. In addition, any clarification of how the 5,000+ consultants' 'work' was done prior to the era of privitization would be welcome. This is a genuine request on behalf of my students as well as myself. Is there an accessible study, report, memoir or whatever that can provide enlightenment?

Among the mysteries of how we deploy valuable pieces of manpower, I note the military's current spokesperson in Afghanistan holds the rank of Rear Admiral. A few years back, his counterpart in Baghdad also was a Rear Admiral. Could not one of the thousands of contractors we pay do the job as well as these seamen supposedly trained at great expense for other duties? How about an officer of lower rank? Who did the job during WW II? If we are to take the current assignment of Rear Admirals as evincing a surplus in the ranks, does this explain in part the Hadley/Perry proposal for a drastic increase in the number of warships? Or does this Rear Admiral moonlight as a trainor/adviser to the Afghan navy?

Secretary Gates' efficiency reforms are hard to question. But they do not even scratch the surface of the problem he will face in the next year, should he stick around. Deficit reduction and a decline in public support for our forward deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan (even public inattention) are combining to bring on what he fears most, as he publicly stated: a real decline in the defense budget.

This is nothing to be feared. When the Secretary worried Monday about a sharp decline in the defense budget, he compared historic defense budgets to "an EKG of a fibrillating heart," with sharp peaks and valleys. He announced his reforms as a way to prevent a new fibrillation.

He misapplied this metaphor. Instead of arriving at a steady heartbeat, he wants to halt the fibrillation at the top. That would be an unsteady heart, and an unsupportable and unnecessary level of defense spending.

Instead, the Secretary should be looking to a leveling off and decline of defense budgets to a peacetime norm, well below the level of today's budgets. In fact, in contrast to his assertion that we have typically built down to sharply, historic data on the defense budget shows that peacetime levels have been quite steady-state.

Moreover, the last time we built down from the end of the Cold War, the resulting force was so successful that it handled multiple peacetime deployments in peacekeeping missions and squashed Sadaam's army like a june bug. Not bad, for a build-down.

This is where the Secretary should be today. Not whittling away at efficiencies, as worthy as that effort is. But preparing for a peacetime defense budget. Why should he prepare for this? Because it will happen.

Why will it happen? Because, despite his calls for protecting defense from deficit reduction, it will be on the table. Why? Because the economics and politics of deficit reduction make it necessary.

Economically, it is impossible to reduce the deficit or lower the debt by focusing on mandatory spending along, despite the Secretary's assertion that mandatories, not defense, are the problem. Defense budgets, including the wars, have more than doubled since 2001; faster growth than mandatories. It is now as large as Social Security and Medicare.

The deficits of the past ten years have occured because of defense spending (including the wars), and the disastrous tax cuts of 2001, not because of mandatories, alone.

Cutting the deficit or lowering the debt share of GDP is impossible if one uses only one of the major spigots, as Secretary Gates seemed to suggest: defense, domestic discretionary, mandatory spending, and revenues. No one of these can reach the goal without total budgetary and programmatic devastation. Instead, all of them must be on the table.

Politically, as well, all of them must be on the table. As the successful exercise in deficit reduction of 1985-1998 showed, no political deal on deficit reduction is possible unless all the elements of the federal budget are on the table.

So there is no way out and leadership now demands that the Secretary join with the others in looking for and planning a responsible curve downward for defense. The key to such a curve is not efficiency, useful as that is. The key will be mission prioritization, risk assessement, and careful choices, something that was not done in the DOD Quadrennial Defense Review last February. Instead, the Secretary signed off on an agenda of endlessly growing and expanding missions for the military in what he calls a "dangerous world."

Dangers there are in the world, but oddly enough, America has never been more secure. An existential threat is gone. Any new one, if it is even imaginable, is decades away. One big regional power -Iraq - is no longer a problem. Iran is not threatening to invade its neighbors; the last time it tried, it did not do so well. North Korea is a shadow of its former self. China is doing business with Taiwan, not war. Al Qaeda, while a nuisance, is not an existential threat. And there are not legions of insurgents around the globe threatening America, or even other states; only the ones battling our our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We should be tailoring our military, and its budgets, accordingly, as we have done in the past.

Based on Gates comments and the DOD press release, I understand the announcements to include the following (with my comments appended).

1) 10% reduction per year for three years in "support contractors." (The total number of these contractors appears to be unknown. One estimate is that the DOD contractors number 790,000; other numbers are higher. In any case, the denominator for this 10% reduction appears to be unknown. Also, it is unclear if this 10% reduction pertains to all contractors or a subset. If the correct number is 790,000, will there actually be three years of reductions of 79,000 of these people?)

2) A freeze of the number of OSD, defense agency, and COMCOM "billets" at the 2010 level for three years. Plus, no more OSD positions to replace contractors ("except for critical needs") and a "clean sheet review" of what everybody is doing. This "rebaselining" will result in a minimum reduction of 50% of the "growth in billets since 2000" and a reduction of at least 50 generals/admirals and 150 senior civilians. (It is not clear how much will result from this; a freeze at current levels for the total OSD, etc bureaucracy is quite literally nothing, but a 50% reduction of the increase since 2000 will mean more. However, on September 10, 2001 then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld complained about the bloat in the Pentagon bureaucracy back then. Permitting almost 50% of the bureaucratic growth since then seems extremely modest.)

3) Freeze and reduce the number of reports sent (by demand) to Congress and reduce "advisory" study funding by 25%. (While many of the report requirements that Congress imposes are superfluous and address some sort of political issue by appearing to do something, some reports to Congress [such as on the F-35's cost growth] are important. This process needs to be monitored to ensure the baby is not thrown out instead of the bathwater.)

4) Review and possibly eliminate some of the 65 boards and commissions, costing $75 million per year, and cut their funding by al least 25%. (Unmentioned but more important, I believe, is to change the rules for membership on these various boards and commissions: any person with any financial connection, directly or indirectly, with defense manufacturers, investment firms, or DOD itself should be excluded.)

5) 10% reduction in funding for intelligence advisory and assistance contractors and a freeze of SES positions in defense intelligence organizations. (Again, the denominator for this 10% reduction appears to be an unknown. How can you downsize an operation you have not measured?)

6) Eliminate the office of the assistant secretary of defense networks, integration and information, the Business Transformation Agency, and Joint Forces Command. (Every long journey must start with the first step; these eliminations are hopefully the start of a very long list.)

7) A task force will oversee the implementation of these measures over the next 90 to 120 days. (After Gates is gone, the new secretary will be tested as the bureaucracy and Congress try to walk most of this backward. From what I know of the prime public candidates to replace Gates, the bureaucracy et al. will largely succeed.)

Overall assessment: Gates has made it clear that he seeks to defend the defense budget from real cuts that he expects from Congress (eg. Barney Frank alternative budget, which he mentioned in passing) and the deficit commission (which he said he wants to talk to). None of the money he seeks to save with these efforts would leave the defense budget; he simply wants to transfer overhead spending to other parts of DOD.

While he explicitly did not, repeat not, say so, I suspect Gates knows he will lose his fight against cuts and that he seeks with these actions to help DOD survive the cuts that are coming. In doing so, these efficiencies are inadequate. They will not transform the Pentagon into something that can survive significant budget reductions and be anything but the same institution at a lower level of spending. That, of course, will be a real disaster because even with dramatically growing DOD budgets our forces have become smaller, older, and less ready to fight.

On the other hand, I believe, Gates deserves credit for starting a process to attempt to deal with the fringes of the defense problem. He is the first secretary of defense to attempt to do so in decades, and he is earnest in his efforts, I believe. There is a long, long way to go, however. I and others have written at some length about what needs to be done; those proposals are readily available upon request.

Strangely, the Pentagon says these new proposals are part of the $102 billion, five year "savings" announced last May. While, again, nothing was said to indicate it, I believe there is something strange about this $102 billion "savings." It's not just that it amounts to very, very little over five years of DOD spending (and that it's not a savings but an internal transfer), but I have come to suspect that it's a rather meaningless number. Instead, it is a device being used to try to extract some efficiencies from the DOD bureaucracy and DOD contractors, and when the real cuts start occurring, these same ideas (and more importantly expansions of them) will be employed to adjust to real cuts.

Those real cuts are not coming from Capitol Hill. Although there has been some hyperventilated talk about bigger than usual cuts in the 2011 DOD appropriations bills coming out of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees (up to $8 billion), much of those cuts may be quite phony. Although the reports and bills are not yet available from the HAC or SAC, a summary from the HAC (at http://appropriations.house.gov/images/stories/pdf/def/FY11_defense_summary.7.28.10.pdf) makes me suspicious that they are up to their usual tricks. Rather than programmatic cuts, it may be that much of the reductions will be gimmicks (such as "revised economic assumptions") and deferments of spending to future years (such as "unobligated expenditure" and "civilian underexecution" actions) that over the long run save nothing. Watch this space when the details become available.

Also, the political porkers are cuing up to make sure that their own pigs stay fat and someone else pays for budget restraint. In this regard, check out the incredibly selfish statements of the governor and congressional delegation of Virginia that queued up in a hyper-flash to announce that someone else needs to save money in the defense budget and that the Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command (now fingered by internal studies, a former commander, and the secretary of defense as useless) is just the kind of defense spending they like. Shame on them. Also, the usual political hacks are trying to savage the Obama Administration for being anti-defense for daring to take a penny of bloat from the Pentagon. In that regard, see the public comments of the top ranking Republican on House Armed Services, Cong. Howard "Buck" McKeon of CA.

Clearly, the change agents for the coming adjustments in the defense budget will not be the congressional porkers and hacks on committees like the appropriations and Armed Services committees.

Last evening on the Newshour our colleague, Winslow Wheeler, was clear in saying that Gates' proposed reductions are fine as far as they go but are really rather unimportant in terms of scale when the enormous size of the defense establishment and budget is considered as a whole.

JFCOM was always a waste of time and money. Consultants and contractors love the place. Why would they not? A giant, pluckable turkey for everyone including retired flag officers, but, there are many equally useless and outmoded functions and organizations that should also be eliminated.

The suggestion was made last evening that this "move" is a gambit on Gates part to try to offer up enough "savings" so that he can save all the force structure he has now plus the procurement programs that he favors. That seems quite likely to be true.

As I argued a couple of weeks back, we don't need all that force structure if we have a different foreign policy, one that does not envision massive expeditionary operations for extended periods of time.

The real issues underlying this announcement have not yet been addressed. Afghanistan and our poverty will force us to look at those issues. If entltlement programs are "on the table," then foreign policy will inevitably be there as well.