Top brass claims personnel costs are swamping DoD, but budget figures say otherwise.
Oops, the political game is showing.
I don’t really thank any of us on AD thought this was the case. We all know that personnel costs are in competition with acquisition costs. Now that a lot of our hardware is broken and worn out, we need new equipment that costs a lot more than it really should. The “easy” way to do that when the overall budget is not going up is to take it out of personnel costs. The hard problem is to remove the politics from procurement and reduce costs.
The defense budget is, and has been for fifty years, the GOP equivalent of whatever “stimulus” or “jobs” program put forth by the Democrats. The money simply flows to a different demographic. Trying to remove politics from the distribution of public funds is like trying to take the wet out of water.
This is not a knock against the military and I am well aware one of the constitutionally mandated responsibilities of our federal government is to provide for the common defense.
But, in the end, it still comes down to divvying up a (presumably) finite supply of dollars. And lots of cheese attracts lots of rats.
The Brass are including Combat pay and the other wartime driven pays that do/can drive up costs. I have to wonder if they are including Recruiting Dollars too, as the Army’s Recruiting Budget really skyrocketed during OIF.
Just like the GO that complaigned about Medical Costs, ignoring the war driven costs.
The Pentagon Warriors (AKA Perfumed Princesses) don’t care about the people who actually deploy and carry the mission out.
It always was. People are indolent & slow on the uptake.
After 20 years active duty in two services, color me completely unsurprised.
They are also about to prorate combat/hazardous duty pay, so the next time I go on leave for 14 days the DoD will save a whopping ~$112. They take money from Soldiers and families while welfare queens get more.
The Brass may say what they’re told to say.
Let me fix that for you:
“Personnel claim top brass costs are swamping DoD, budget figures agree.”
Probably pretty close to the truth.