The military spending solution..

When we look at the Defense budget, we think of expensive weapons development programs and production programs. We think of our active-duty Personnel and the salaries, and GI BILL, and all of the benefits that entails. But there is one area we often lose sight of, the actual defense department bureaucracy itself. This is where we forget that our labor force of civilians in the DoD is ballooned to approximately 700,000 personnel. This is a number that continues to grow, while we have shrunk our active-duty personnel steadily. This is reminiscent of School budgets, where administration staffs continue to grow even as teachers in classrooms quite often fall short. And so too, while our combat and support teams continue to be strained, as the number of active tours increase, which makes those who have determined to serve their country decide that the price is too great. They shorten their original career plans, and a growing number depart early. We need to look critically at the civilian work force. While we had less technology with 500,000 person workforce, we now have more advanced technology, enabling greater productivity,yet we have burgeoning DoD civilian work force of approximately 700,000 civilian workers. We must be wise in our actions and use of American Tax Revenue, prudent job cuts are appropriate especially in these times of lean tax revenue. It is time to cut our workforce in the DoD civilian sector. We do this by actively reorganizing departments to be more productive, freezing hiring levels, and through attrition, retirement, and buyouts to create early departures, we set a goal of 500,000, think a half a million, in as orderly and rapid a fashion as possible. We must start treating the civilian workforce in the same manner a corporate workforce is managed, operated and paired. We can use hearings by congress to listen to the generals, and those department managers, and go after a rapid clearing of those we could afford to lose. There is never a bureaucratic workforce which has grown in leaps and bounds to the degree our military civilian workforce has without the incorporation of duplicate personnel roles, and just generally bloated departments. This is borne out by a study by the military itself. It is time we do what is necessary to support our combat personnel. These are critical actions that must be taken now, to afford a strong military and alleviate cutbacks of critical personnel later. Jon Basil Utley, of the "American Conservative Magazine" inspired much of the impetus for this argument made here by the author. You can read an in depth article which reflects many details not incorporated in this opinion but did help shape it. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sequestration-the-way-to-cut-defense-waste/

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