The crisis of defense budget cuts
By Scott Van Cleef
If you thought political gridlock and partisan bickering were simply Washington sideshows, that’s about to change.
Our national security is about to take a huge hit.
Sequestration, what once was considered unthinkable and so draconian that it would force prudent agreement on long-term deficit reductions, is looming on the horizon.
Van Cleef, a resident of Fincastle, is a retired Air Force brigadier general and member of the Air Force Association.
February 19, 2013 - 12:20 AM
While true the military has been faced with some serious cuts (I hear about them from a Guardsman I work with) it’s hard to be upset at the thought of the military making more cuts when you consider we spend more on our military than something like the next 17 nations combined.
Still, the military takes up a relatively small part of our GDP. And, when those people working for the military and their contractors are laid off, they’ll have to go on unemployment, food stamps, etc.
It seems you either pay them to stay and work, or you pay them for being idle.
Perhaps the real problem is we’re not taking enough in from those best able to pay in the form of taxes?
I work with government customers who are unable to spend money to fulfill their missions. They are at the point of having to say that the mission cannot be fulfilled. Instead of figuring out how to “do more with less” as they have been doing, they are having to “do less with less”… or perhaps nothing. It’s hard to protect a nation with “nothing”, especially when tiny amounts of information, unnoticed, can make the difference between safety and disaster. What I am hearing agrees with the author; the lack of a reliable, multi-year budget is at the heart of immense gridlock amongst the people who have to get the work done.