for school all week. I stared at my homework and just felt dumb. Then
today I woke up in a really good mood and did a week's worth of all my
subjects in about 2 hours. So, Update time.
Let's talk about current events. So, there is all this talk about
funding for the military and reducing the forces. People are worried
that it will hurt the troops, or hurt our war-readiness. To some
degree, these fears are genuine, but let's break it down a little bit,
from the in-the-military perspective. There are two kinds of military,
garrison and operational. And there are combinations of the two.
Garrison operations, that's like the hospital in Bethesda. Or it's
like what I did in Okinawa, it's having an office and not being in the
field. In a way, it is what I am doing now, too. I am deployed, but to
a garrison unit. We are on a base, we are not out in the field and no
one is shooting at us.
Military funding works in a really bizarre way. Places like Bethesda
have so much money that you can't believe it. Partly that's important,
there are really excellent medical procedures that happen there that
require top funding. The ability to pioneer in the field of medicine
requires money. However, there are also flat-screen HD TVs all over
the place. That adds to the concept that we're a top-tier hospital,
but it is also a pretty effective waste of tax-payer dollars. The way
that budgeting works in garrison is something like this: Each October
a budget comes out. There are X dollars for the fiscal year. If you,
as a department, spend less than $X, your budget the following year
will be less by that amount. Consequently, around about August or
September each year, every department spends whatever money they have
left over on anything that they can remotely call a reasonable
expense. Sometimes, depending on the department, you can find some
truly extravagant items. You know that it's a budget-blowing time when
you suddenly get office chairs that are $600 each. Or the
aforementioned flat screens. If anyone does an audit and finds things
like this, it is considered Fraud, Waste and Abuse. It's a really big
deal. But just like in real estate, where developers have boats named
First Draft, it is usually not caught or disputed. That's just how
budgeting works in the military.
When you're in an operational environment, it is a little different.
Well, at least with the Marines. I have no idea how it works with the
other branches, I have never been operational with them. But the
Marines always get the oldest equipment and the least money. As a
result, they tend to be really good at re-purposing and innovating
with what they have. But even there, especially the Navy side of the
house, there are some total wastes of budget. I was on a field
exercise in Okinawa and we had stretchers. They were old, probably
Vietnam era, stretchers, but they were built to last and would be
expensive to replace. They were collapsible and, when we requisitioned
them from the supply compound, they were collapsed. When we got to the
field we found that most of them were missing the bolt that locked
them in place, when expanded. The mindset was that we could throw them
away and get new ones. (Though we would not have gotten NEW ones, we'd
have gotten the same Vietnam era ones, but not broken.) I looked
around the site and found a repair kit for something else that had
bolts that would work, talked to some Chiefs and got permission to fix
the stretchers using the bolts. I spent pretty much the whole day
doing it, but saved our unit some untold number of dollars in the
process. It was a simple matter, but not one that anyone was willing
to go through the trouble to take care of otherwise.
All of this to say, I am not sure that budget cuts would be a bad
thing. The military doesn't budget well. It is a government operation.
It is inefficient and poorly manages its money. If it were a
corporation, it would go bust within 5 years. I think that a little
belt-tightening, if managed correctly, would not go amiss. Now, there
is no evidence to support the idea that we WOULD manage budget cuts
correctly. Much more likely, people would still get their $600 office
chairs, but at the same time they wouldn't be able to afford
ammunition for the troops in the field. It's one of those things, the
people who have the greatest claim to financial gain are not
necessarily those who are most in need. But that tends to be true
across the board, right? It is one of the faults of the capitalist
system. (Which as we all know is the worst system around, except for
all the other ones.)
And the money that we do have, the money that gets spent on big ticket
items and black ops budgets, that kind of stuff is really well spent.
Have you seen the electromagnetic rail gun the Navy has now? Have you
heard about the anti-laser? Military Research and Development gets a
bad rap, and a lot of the time deservedly so. There is a lot of money
spent on projects that never see the light of day, a lot of money
spent on vaporware. But when we do have a winner, it tends to change
the face of warfare. Generally, anything published here:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ is worth looking at.
And our Special Forces, the guys who are out there in the mud, really
facing down the big challenges, those guys are funded pretty well, and
will continue to be. They are out of a different pot of money
all-together. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/go-inside-the-56-billion-black-budget/)
The guys who you would be worried about are the Marines on the ground.
The grunts are always the ones who haven't enough money, who have the
old equipment and the worst deal. But they have that now, they had
that in the boom-times of the past 10 years. Partially it is good
strategy to keep those guys unhappy. They are incredibly innovative
with what they have at that point. Partially it is a morale issue. A
happy Marine is a bitching Marine. But partially it is just that even
with all the money you could possibly spend, there is never enough
money for war.
And I am not sure that there should be.
Ultimately a finding issue comes down to an issue of priorities. It
comes down to an issue of value. It comes down to an issue of
investment and returns. What is the benefit at this point? Is war
bringing us a valuable return? I am not sure it is. Let's say that we
wipe out the insurgent base in Afghanistan. Let's say it happens
before the intended pull-out date. Let's say that we leave Afghanistan
in as-good, if not better condition than Iraq. What will that have
achieved? What will that do for the US economy? What will it do for
the morale of the people?
The world at large can see the pie-graph of democracy increase, but
will it change the burnt-baby ratio in Afghanistan? Will the Jay Leno
man-on-the-street interview be less frustrated? I am not sure it will.
I think that maybe that's partially the fault of the military. We
spent our money on our chairs when maybe we should have spent it on
something more important. Maybe we wasted our profitability and
capitalism is right when it takes away a little of our budget.
For more of the Afghan Updates, or any I failed to send you, please
visit: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc
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