blindpig
02-25-2014, 04:58 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Monday it would shrink the U.S. Army to pre-World War Two levels, eliminate the popular A-10 aircraft and reduce military benefits in order to meet 2015 spending caps, setting up an election-year fight with the Congress over national defence priorities.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, previewing the Pentagon's ideas on how to adapt to government belt-tightening, said the defense budget due out next week would be the first to look beyond 13 years of conflict, shifting away from long-term ground wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
He cautioned, however, that the country needed to be clear-eyed about the risks posed by lower budget levels, which would challenge the Pentagon to field a smaller yet well-trained force that could cope with any adversary, but might not be able to respond simultaneously to multiple conflicts.
"We ... face the risk of uncertainty in a dynamic and increasingly dangerous security environment," Hagel said. "Budget reductions inevitably reduce the military's margin of error in dealing with these risks, as other powers are continuing to modernize their weapons portfolios."
The cuts come as the Pentagon is attempting to absorb nearly a trillion dollars in reductions to projected spending over a decade. A two-year bipartisan budget deal in December eased some of the pressure on the department, but still cut its planned spending by $31 billion in 2014 and another $45 billion in 2015.
The Pentagon's budget for the 2015 fiscal year beginning in October is an estimated $496 billion, about the same amount as the current fiscal year. Beginning in 2016, the department's budget is slated to assume even larger spending cuts, an event Hagel said could jeopardize national security.
Defense analysts said the budget priorities sketched out by Hagel would begin to move the Pentagon in the right direction on issues like military compensation reform and eliminating waste but could have difficulty winning support from lawmakers facing mid-term elections to Congress.
"Congress always modifies the president's budget request. They will again. The question is will they do it in small ways or large ways," said Kathleen Hicks, a former senior defense official who is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
"I think the personnel pieces are the trickiest for them," she added, saying the challenge for the Pentagon was judging "in advance what is most likely to be accepted, particularly in a mid-term election year, and what is off the table."
The proposed cuts ran into resistance from senior lawmakers in both houses of Congress.
Representative Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said it would be "foolish" to change military benefits before a report on the issue next year, while Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon would have "heavy challenge" convincing lawmakers to retire the A-10 fleet.
Hagel said the Pentagon plans to reduce the size of the Army to between 440,000 and 450,000 soldiers. The Army is currently about 520,000 soldiers and had been planning to draw down to about 490,000 in the coming year.
A reduction to 450,000 would be the Army's smallest size since 1940, before the United States entered World War Two, when it counted a troop strength of 267,767, according to Army figures. The Army's previous post-World War Two low was 479,426 in 1999.
"We chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service - active and reserve - in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority and to protect critical capabilities," Hagel said.
Despite a congressional rebuff of Pentagon efforts to reform personnel costs in recent years, the defense chief announced a series of new steps to try to curb military and civilian personnel spending, which now makes up about half its budget.
Hagel said the department would seek a 1 percent raise in pay for military personnel but would slow the growth of tax-free housing allowances, reduce the annual subsidy for military commissaries and reform the TRICARE health insurance program for military family members and retirees.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank, said the Pentagon was heading in the "right direction with military compensation reform," and that notions of keeping faith with troops were about more than just pay.
"Keeping faith also means ensuring our troops are the best trained and equipped in the world," Harrison said, adding that the proposed reforms sought to balance tradeoffs between pay and benefits and training and modernization.
"The clear message is that if Congress chooses to ignore these reforms again, it will force additional cuts in training and modernization which will break faith with the troops," he said.
Hagel also said the Pentagon would eliminate the Air Force fleet of A-10 "Warthog" close air support planes, which are much beloved by ground troops, in order to ensure continued funding of the new long-range bomber, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and a new aerial refuelling tanker.
In a reversal of an earlier decision, he said the Pentagon decided to retire the 50-year-old U-2 spy plane in favour of the unmanned Global Hawk system after success in reducing the operating costs of the newer plane.
The defense secretary added the Pentagon had decided to build only 32 of its new Littoral Combat Ships, down from the 52 originally planned. He said the funds would be ploughed back into developing a fast, new, more lethal ship similar to a frigate.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/uk-usa-budget-defense-idUKBREA1N1JQ20140225
What are we to make of this, is this the 'Peace Dividend' finally come home?
Don't be silly.
The Empire says it is broke and cannot afford to pay veterans the benefits promised. And of course the technology of war is changing rapidly. But this technological change does not occur in a vacuum and is conditioned by the perceived needs of the generals and those by the rulers of society. So it looks like they do not forsee need for many 'boots on the ground'. And perhaps the crop of deranged and broken veterans derived from armies of occupation is intolerable, at least on public relations grounds.(Otoh, this does provide the ruling class with tens of thousands of psycho cops)
I remember years ago when Newswolf pointed out the the all volunteer professional army starved the working class of military training for potential revolutionaries. While I suspect this one of those side effects of policy, mebbe not. In any case that trend is intensified.
This trend is in opposition to the trend in military affairs since the rise of the bourgoise. Heavy calvary was the basis of the feudal order, professional, well trained, expensively equipped, and by the way, the ruling class. It was the bourgoise re-invention of well trained infantry, in the form of pikesmen, which marked the beginning of the end for the knightly class. Over the next few hundred years this trend continued, reducing the exalted warriors to flat out mercenaries and hustlers, without the pretence. Armies also became larger as population increased and more commoners entered the ranks to meet the needs of nascent national states. The Thirty Years War brought this trend to a pause, perhaps because of the incredible destruction and expense of that civil war of the Holy Roman Empire. Of course this coincided with the beginning of the Enlightenment and the adoption of rationality. The gratutious destruction of the means of production became bad form and the expense was ruinous. Another aspect(chicken or egg?) is the invention of the socket bayonet, which eliminated the need for pikesmen to protect the musketeers. In any case armies became smaller, well drilled, and entirely working class, except for the officers. These were despised by the greater population as brutes.
And so things went until the French Revolution, which armed the populace to defeat the aristocrats. Then the cat was out of the bag, growing population and wealth meant the more battalions the better. After this time the nation state came into flower, conveniently providing a non-material, illusory motivation for these masses of soldiers to suffer and die for society's new masters. The common soldier was lionized, at least until the parades were over.
Looks as though we've come full circle, the military is to become again a body of specalized professions, aircraft and drone pilots, highly trained and expensively equipped 'special forces', 'cyber-warriors'. Only persons with officer's commissions will pull triggers, all else will be support personnel, grooms and suttlers. And cops of course, they'll always need cops. These hot shots will form a big chunk of the new so-called middleclass, an aristocracy of labor. Until the robots put them out of a job.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, previewing the Pentagon's ideas on how to adapt to government belt-tightening, said the defense budget due out next week would be the first to look beyond 13 years of conflict, shifting away from long-term ground wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
He cautioned, however, that the country needed to be clear-eyed about the risks posed by lower budget levels, which would challenge the Pentagon to field a smaller yet well-trained force that could cope with any adversary, but might not be able to respond simultaneously to multiple conflicts.
"We ... face the risk of uncertainty in a dynamic and increasingly dangerous security environment," Hagel said. "Budget reductions inevitably reduce the military's margin of error in dealing with these risks, as other powers are continuing to modernize their weapons portfolios."
The cuts come as the Pentagon is attempting to absorb nearly a trillion dollars in reductions to projected spending over a decade. A two-year bipartisan budget deal in December eased some of the pressure on the department, but still cut its planned spending by $31 billion in 2014 and another $45 billion in 2015.
The Pentagon's budget for the 2015 fiscal year beginning in October is an estimated $496 billion, about the same amount as the current fiscal year. Beginning in 2016, the department's budget is slated to assume even larger spending cuts, an event Hagel said could jeopardize national security.
Defense analysts said the budget priorities sketched out by Hagel would begin to move the Pentagon in the right direction on issues like military compensation reform and eliminating waste but could have difficulty winning support from lawmakers facing mid-term elections to Congress.
"Congress always modifies the president's budget request. They will again. The question is will they do it in small ways or large ways," said Kathleen Hicks, a former senior defense official who is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
"I think the personnel pieces are the trickiest for them," she added, saying the challenge for the Pentagon was judging "in advance what is most likely to be accepted, particularly in a mid-term election year, and what is off the table."
The proposed cuts ran into resistance from senior lawmakers in both houses of Congress.
Representative Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said it would be "foolish" to change military benefits before a report on the issue next year, while Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon would have "heavy challenge" convincing lawmakers to retire the A-10 fleet.
Hagel said the Pentagon plans to reduce the size of the Army to between 440,000 and 450,000 soldiers. The Army is currently about 520,000 soldiers and had been planning to draw down to about 490,000 in the coming year.
A reduction to 450,000 would be the Army's smallest size since 1940, before the United States entered World War Two, when it counted a troop strength of 267,767, according to Army figures. The Army's previous post-World War Two low was 479,426 in 1999.
"We chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service - active and reserve - in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority and to protect critical capabilities," Hagel said.
Despite a congressional rebuff of Pentagon efforts to reform personnel costs in recent years, the defense chief announced a series of new steps to try to curb military and civilian personnel spending, which now makes up about half its budget.
Hagel said the department would seek a 1 percent raise in pay for military personnel but would slow the growth of tax-free housing allowances, reduce the annual subsidy for military commissaries and reform the TRICARE health insurance program for military family members and retirees.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank, said the Pentagon was heading in the "right direction with military compensation reform," and that notions of keeping faith with troops were about more than just pay.
"Keeping faith also means ensuring our troops are the best trained and equipped in the world," Harrison said, adding that the proposed reforms sought to balance tradeoffs between pay and benefits and training and modernization.
"The clear message is that if Congress chooses to ignore these reforms again, it will force additional cuts in training and modernization which will break faith with the troops," he said.
Hagel also said the Pentagon would eliminate the Air Force fleet of A-10 "Warthog" close air support planes, which are much beloved by ground troops, in order to ensure continued funding of the new long-range bomber, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and a new aerial refuelling tanker.
In a reversal of an earlier decision, he said the Pentagon decided to retire the 50-year-old U-2 spy plane in favour of the unmanned Global Hawk system after success in reducing the operating costs of the newer plane.
The defense secretary added the Pentagon had decided to build only 32 of its new Littoral Combat Ships, down from the 52 originally planned. He said the funds would be ploughed back into developing a fast, new, more lethal ship similar to a frigate.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/uk-usa-budget-defense-idUKBREA1N1JQ20140225
What are we to make of this, is this the 'Peace Dividend' finally come home?
Don't be silly.
The Empire says it is broke and cannot afford to pay veterans the benefits promised. And of course the technology of war is changing rapidly. But this technological change does not occur in a vacuum and is conditioned by the perceived needs of the generals and those by the rulers of society. So it looks like they do not forsee need for many 'boots on the ground'. And perhaps the crop of deranged and broken veterans derived from armies of occupation is intolerable, at least on public relations grounds.(Otoh, this does provide the ruling class with tens of thousands of psycho cops)
I remember years ago when Newswolf pointed out the the all volunteer professional army starved the working class of military training for potential revolutionaries. While I suspect this one of those side effects of policy, mebbe not. In any case that trend is intensified.
This trend is in opposition to the trend in military affairs since the rise of the bourgoise. Heavy calvary was the basis of the feudal order, professional, well trained, expensively equipped, and by the way, the ruling class. It was the bourgoise re-invention of well trained infantry, in the form of pikesmen, which marked the beginning of the end for the knightly class. Over the next few hundred years this trend continued, reducing the exalted warriors to flat out mercenaries and hustlers, without the pretence. Armies also became larger as population increased and more commoners entered the ranks to meet the needs of nascent national states. The Thirty Years War brought this trend to a pause, perhaps because of the incredible destruction and expense of that civil war of the Holy Roman Empire. Of course this coincided with the beginning of the Enlightenment and the adoption of rationality. The gratutious destruction of the means of production became bad form and the expense was ruinous. Another aspect(chicken or egg?) is the invention of the socket bayonet, which eliminated the need for pikesmen to protect the musketeers. In any case armies became smaller, well drilled, and entirely working class, except for the officers. These were despised by the greater population as brutes.
And so things went until the French Revolution, which armed the populace to defeat the aristocrats. Then the cat was out of the bag, growing population and wealth meant the more battalions the better. After this time the nation state came into flower, conveniently providing a non-material, illusory motivation for these masses of soldiers to suffer and die for society's new masters. The common soldier was lionized, at least until the parades were over.
Looks as though we've come full circle, the military is to become again a body of specalized professions, aircraft and drone pilots, highly trained and expensively equipped 'special forces', 'cyber-warriors'. Only persons with officer's commissions will pull triggers, all else will be support personnel, grooms and suttlers. And cops of course, they'll always need cops. These hot shots will form a big chunk of the new so-called middleclass, an aristocracy of labor. Until the robots put them out of a job.