How the Defense Department Can Save Billions Without Worrying About National Security
Rushford, Gregory G.
How the Defense Department Can Save Billions Without Worrying About National Security by Gregory G. Rushford Cutting the defense budget is an issue associated with tough choices. It is generally...
...Pueblo in 1968...
...1 billion from eliminating civilian grade creep...
...600 million from cutting out unnecessary moves...
...Eight per cent of the budget, about $9 billion, now goes to military pensions...
...there would not be time for them to be assimilated into the regular forces...
...For .reasons largely “unknown,” the number of GS-15 and GS-16 (middle management) defense civil servants has nearly doubled since 1961...
...With overlap like that, the committee said, many of the studies are a “total waste...
...The Wall Street Journal reports that “of the 3,682 captains in the Navy, only 336 are assigned to sea duty...
...After a two-year effort to reduce these reports, 72 were identified as useless and eliminated...
...For six months, as an “air policeman,” I fixed parking tickets for my fellow warriors at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., waiting to be sent to Korea for a year...
...These are the people who run ski resorts in Germany, hotels i n Hawaii, golf courses wherever there are military officers, and a myriad of other recreational activities worldwide...
...More than $2.7 billion every year goes to moving military personnel around at a pace that is not only wasteful, but counter-productive...
...For a variety of reasons, nothing much ever gets done about the military’s personnel waste...
...The GAO in 1974 documented the wasted time at such weekend training periods as costing about $1.2 billion a year...
...As wasters, we were in a class by ourselves...
...But more than half of the defense budget-$57 billion of $101 billiongoes to what the Pentagon calls “manpower”: paychecks for five million military personnel, reservists, defense civilians, and pensioners...
...Conservatively, that’s over $7 billion that the Pentagon is wasting for reasons having nothing to do with the national defense...
...The regular services recognize the problems with the reserves...
...These are the areas of the defense budget that cry out for close examination...
...Cassandras are seldom ignored in America...
...It’s called “grade creep,” meaning there have been weak controls by top management because of pressures over the years to create unnecessary jobs...
...Unlike 90 per cent of the federal government’s civil servants, who contribute seven per cent of their annual salaries to a pension for which they will not be eligible until they have worked 30 years and reached the age of 55, military personnel contribute nothing and may collect full retirement benefits immediately upon completion of 20 years’ service while still in their 30s...
...Because nobody really expects us to be in lengthy combat with the Russians, most reservists would never be used in a real war...
...Because of congressional pressures the Pentagon has eliminated 18,000 support positions in Europe and replaced them with combat positions...
...Examples are nearly everywhere one looks...
...The GAO has recommended reducing the military presence at Crane from 68 to 3, one officer and two enlisted men...
...One congressional study points out that while we had one general or admiral for every 5,000 troops during World War 11, we now have one for every 1,600 troops...
...Congressman Les Aspin recently discovered one chief petty officer who retired in 1976 at age 35...
...Then the General Accounting Office discovered that 94 new reports had been added during the cutback effort for a net gain of 22 reports...
...If the armed forces are overserviced, they are increasingly overadministered, too...
...Only six per cent of those eligible to retire from the military remain after 20 years...
...Nobody can say for sure what it all costs, since the 250,000 employees are under a special “non-appropriated” fund category, but, as one congressional staff member who is investigating the situation says, “To use a quarter of a million people to service a military force of only 2.1 million is outrageous...
...Somebody ought to do something about it...
...The Defense Department operates about 90 commercial and industrial military support activities besides shipyards...
...But the Congress, demonstrating once more the strong political alliances between ranking congressmen and reserve associations, refused to approve the savings...
...The Navy even recommended to Congress last year that its paid reserve force be cut by half, to 50,000...
...The man had joined the Navy on his seventeenth birthday...
...The 2.1 million military personnel on active duty today are 600,000 fewer-that’s 21 per cent- than the total in 1964, but in 1964 payroll took only 47 per cent of the defense budget...
...Grade creep wastes at least $1 billion annually...
...By that time the man will probably be receiving a’ second pension from a civilian career...
...Weekend Warriors To those of us who are veterans of the National Guard or Reserves no stories of military waste can match personal experience...
...The cost of this non-military part of Crane’s military personnel budget was $795,000 of a personnel total of $1.2 million...
...From Base to Base About $1.7 billion this year-more than th.e B-1 bomber appropriations and every other weapons system save the Trident submarine and missilewill be spent just to move servicemen and their families from base to base...
...1.7 billion in personnel costs from dropping the Reserve and Guard...
...3-4 billion from eliminating unnecessary support personnel and other inefficient management practices...
...Gregory Rushford, a former congressional staff aide, is now a Washington writer...
...The active forces are jealous of the monies diverted to the reserves’ budget and doubtful about what the reservists could do in a real war anyway...
...The remaining 45 military men, plus 10 civilians, “were providing support services for the military complement, such as food and housekeeping, recreation, commissary and exchange stores, and health care...
...Perhaps it made some sense to encourage men in their late thirties to retire in the days when the Army was geared to the cavalry and infantry, where youth makes a significant difference in performance...
...Much of it is ongoing and doesn’t come up for approval the way new weapons systems do, and much of the waste gives members of Congress money for their districts, so they are loath to do away with it...
...My own memories of idle time in the Air National Guard in the 1960s are typical, I am sure, of those of the hundreds of thousands of “weekend warriors” who still spend their paid weekend drills doing little more than watching television and reading books...
...Perhaps another $3 billion a year now pays for support personnel who are simply unnecessary...
...An additional $92,000 went to a commissary that served primarily retired military personnel living in the area...
...Nobody knows exactly how many hundreds of thousands of people are paid to perform nonessential jobs...
...In 25 years, pension costs couId go as high as $30 billion annually...
...that’s seven times what pensions cost 12 years ago when they took up 2.4 per cent of the budget...
...Reserve and veterans’ associations constitute a powerful political lobby for the status quo...
...If we let only combat personnel retire after 20 years and require everyone else to serve 30 years, we could save $4 billion annually...
...Crane has 4,500 civilian employees and 68 from the military, of whom 19 are officers and 49 are enlisted men...
...The petty officer had graduated first in his class at various service schools...
...he represents precisely the kind of person who should be encouraged to stay in uniform...
...I was one of 14,000 reservists activated with the Air National Guard when the North Koreans stole the spyship U.S.S...
...By repeatedly taking advantage of Navy regulations that offered enlistment time credit for re-enlisting three months before the end of a normal tour of duty, he became eligible for retirement after serving only 18 years, four months, and 26 days...
...A recent House Appropriations Committee report found that Defense logistics studies are currently being conducted by “24 Defense Department organizations, 93 Army organizations, 39 Air Force, 51 Navy, 2 Defense Supply Agency, 20 other government agencies, and 188 defense contractors...
...Although their work forces are predominantly civilian, more than 10,000 military personnel are assigned to these activities as well...
...Two hundred fifty thousand civilian employees are listed innocuously in congressional budget books as working on “military morale and welfare activities...
...The Pentagon itself has been concerned that the $850 million it spends annually for 382 reports to various federal agencies and Congress is far too much...
...This is not merely a military problem...
...The installation’s work involves explosives and ammunition, but the GAO investigators discovered that only 23 of the military personnel were doing official military work...
...But there are now over a million military jobs that could be better or just as well filled by men and women in their forties and fifties...
...Why shouldn’t they take their pension and get extra income from a civilian job instead of remaining in the military...
...If they stay on, they lose money...
...and the beneficiaries of our largesse are often people at the peak of their performing power, people who are capable of continuing to do good work in the military but instead are paid by the public to retire from the military, often to do their peak performing in civilian jobs...
...The turbulence in personnel moves (called PCS, for Permanent Change of Station) has its roots in the old theory that the Army should move its officers from job to job to broaden the experience of potential Chiefs of Staff...
...After that glorious service I returned to Washington and finished my interrupted schooling courtesy of the GI bill...
...The manpower side of the defense budget can easily be cut by the $5 to $7 billion President Carter campaign e d for, without the slightest effect on what even the toughest of hard-liners could construe to be national security precautions...
...Another $1.7 billion keeps the National-Guard and Reserves, who are almost completely useless, in inefficient business...
...Of the 790,200 soldiers in the Army, only 160,000 are combat troops...
...We would also retain more officers if they did not have to put their families through the trouble of nearly annual moves...
...The Pentagon admits to overstaffing its civilian work force of about one million as well...
...This would save another $2.7 billion in equipment costs...
...That means the rest of us pay up to $9 billion each year for military retirement...
...My job was to deliver contraceptives to the offbase Korean night clubs that catered to the GI trade...
...But to stay would have meant forgoing over $156,000 in military pension checks before he reached age 65...
...One calculation estimates savings of $250 million next year if the average tour of duty in one place were lengthened just from 14 to 18 months...
...Congressman Aspin has calculated that still another $1 billion in hidden costs is associated with these transients and estimates that “on any given day next year, 30,000 of the Army’s 790,000 men won’t be working or assigned to any job because they will be packing, moving, or unpacking...
...In response to other pressures to reduce unnecessary layers of staff at headquarters the Army has been able to increase its combat divisions from 13 to 16 without adding personnel...
...That action added $72 million to the Navy Reserve payroll this year...
...It is generally taken to mean eliminating crucial weapons, making the United States a second-rate power, letting the Russians run roughshod over the world...
...These being the doomsday terms in which defense budget cuts are discussed, it’s not surprising that those cuts are hard to achieve...
...But even for future Chiefs of Staff there are often various challenging jobs on the same bases...
...In any event, the potential savings are clear, safe, and relatively simple: $4 billion from instituting 30year retirement for all but combat troops...
...During Vietnam, for political reasons, very few reservists were called...
...Issues of military strength should be argued, but the Pentagon’s personnel overspending is another story altogether...
...The GAO selected one such installation, the Naval Weapons Support Center in Crane, Indiana, for a case study...
...Probably $3 billion is wasted every year because of poor management practices and over-bureaucratization in the Defense Department and the services...
...They would have to be suckers to stay...
Vol. 9 • March 1977 • No. 1
