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All of those DoD line items can be reduced: salaries (firing people), maintenance and fuel (fewer, more efficient bases, vehicles, etc), and equipment (cheaper,
by fastball 2y ago
All of those DoD line items can be reduced: salaries (firing people), maintenance and fuel (fewer, more efficient bases, vehicles, etc), and equipment (cheaper, more re-usable equipment). Anduril seems like a good example here, given that they are not a cost-plus military company and seem to have efficiency fairly high on their list of priorities.
Entitlements and health reimbursements can and should be reduced.
- thatguy0900 2y agoReducing health reimbursements requires a top down overhaul of the whole US medical system. Either that or just telling poor people they can die in the streets outside of the hospital
- fastball 2y ago> Reducing health reimbursements requires a top down overhaul of the whole US medical system. Great let's get started. > Either that or just telling poor people they can die in the streets outside of the hospital Does the lion's share of US healthcare reimbursements go towards ensuring poor people don't die on the streets? I hadn't see that statistic.
- TulliusCicero 2y agoGoing with more efficient contractors make sense, but just saying "we'll make our bases more efficient and do more with less" is easy to say and hard to do. I'm sure a lot of European countries were trying to do more with less when they embraced the 90s peace dividend, and then what we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine and everyone was checking out the state of their armies, was that mostly they had just done less with less.
- fastball 2y agoThe counter-point to that is that Russia has continued to spend a lot on their military and yet wasn't able to steamroll Ukraine at all, so maybe the US is also spending more to get less. Not doing less with less doesn't mean you are doing more with more.
- mullingitover 2y agoRussia's problem was they thought they were spending a lot on their military, but they were really enriching their top military brass while their ancient gear mostly rotted.
- fastball 2y agoYeah, I remember reading a headline like: "Kremlin can't account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets" Gotcha! That was actually the Pentagon[1]. [1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/
- mullingitover 2y agoMan, that's a solid whatabout zinger. Back on topic, however, this is what I'm talking about[1]: > The radical-patriotic television channel Tsargrad indignantly reported that “the actual scale of corruption under [former Defense Minister Sergey] Shoigu was not in the millions but in the trillions of rubles that officials dishonorably stole from the Russian Army.” [1] https://cepa.org/article/russias-military-graft-purge-is-destined-to-fail https://cepa.org/article/russias-military-graft-purge-is-des...
- fastball 2y agoI don't disagree that Russia might not be spending their military money effectively (including with copious corruption), but that really has no bearing on whether the US is spending their money effectively, which as far as I can tell we are not. I brought up Russia merely as an example that spending money does not mean your military is more capable.
- ajross 2y agoIt's worth pointing out that literally none of the magic tricks you're invoking are part of the linked article. I get that it sounds great in a libertarian comment on HN. It won't happen, is my point. It's too difficult, not amenable to simple solutions, largely mistaken, of questionable value (c.f. my points above) and in any case would be to politically costly to even contemplate in public. So they're doing theater instead.
- fastball 2y agoThese are not magic tricks, they are things businesses/organizations/countries do every single day.