(Obama Board Says Military Retirement “Unaffordable”
(Obama Board Says Military Retirement “Unaffordable”
MOAA ^ | 8/12/10
Posted on Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:59:31 AM by pabianice
On July 22, the Defense Business Board task force recommended that the Secretary of Defense reduce the DoD civilian workforce by more than 111,000, and laid the groundwork for potential future recommendations to cut spending on military retirement, health care, family support, and other programs.
Additionally, the task force recommended drastic reductions in combatant command staffing, hiring freezes, and elimination of organizational duplication. These preliminary recommendations will be followed in October by additional cost-cutting proposals.
For the last year, the Defense Business Board has predicted major problems for the Defense budget as the nation deals with deficit reduction efforts, the economic slowdown, escalating health care and personnel costs, and the potential exit from two wars.
Board members believe that avoiding a looming fiscal crisis will require cutting the Defense budget beyond Secretary Gates’ recently announced target of a $100-billion reduction in “overhead” spending.
The Board’s “Initial Observations” briefing devoted an entire section to costs for military compensation, retirement, health care, veterans affairs, concurrent receipt, commissaries, dependent education, and military family housing. It particularly highlighted costs associated with TRICARE For Life.
A page titled “The ‘Military Retirement’ sacred cow is increasingly unaffordable” cites increases in the number of military retirees since 1980 (as if this weren’t the direct result of decisions by every administration and Congress since the 1950s to induce a large standing career force to protect America and the world) and criticizes the 20-year retirement system (as if the military could have sustained the force over the last 10 years of repeated wartime deployments without it).
Another cites personnel cost growth since 1998 – conveniently overlooking that 1998 was the nadir of two decades of erosion of military pay, retirement, health care, and other benefits and that the resulting retention problems of that era were what sparked Congress to embark on an extended program to fix them.
Unfortunately, the Defense Business Board report is only one of the early shots in what likely will be years of budget battles to reconcile military and other needs with truly daunting deficit projections.
How about leaving the men and women that keep us safe alone and cutting the Communist social programs! NO not Social Security and Medicare we pay for those every week we work. Abolish FOOD STAMPS, PUBLIC HOUSING, Schools that teach in any other language other than ENGLISH! We need the military but we don’t need the EPA, Home Land Security, TSA agents, EEOC, disband those and see how much we save. The Communist social programs are the problems and the military is the solution. How about letting the military round up all the Communists and let the solution solve the problem.