If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district. - Jack Murtha

Good post, Hilzoy. As I read it, I was thinking about Murtha's recent statement.

Big money flows to congressional districts that build expensive death devices. And wherever big money goes it is accompanied by scammers, schemers, and political slush funds. Slush funds that are a quid qou pro for rubber stamping cost overruns.

Using the money instead to improve the men and women that serve- pay, health, education, housing- is a better use of the dollars.

Unfortunately, it is also harder to steal, so don't look for big changes any time soon. . .

so gop in congress complain that cutting the f-22 will hurt manufacturing jobs...

maybe GM just needs to arm their vehicles to get republicans on board...

Again as it has been stated many times before , our military budget is being put into the wrong kind of war materiel. We are not fighting the cold war any more. What would you rather have one F-22 @ 140 million or 6 F-15's (27 Million each). Who is the enemy Russia? -I think not; their petro dollar collapse has cut back military spending. China -yah right -their economy is suffering already as Americans cut back on buying crap. Our takeover will come from being broke and having everyone in the world owning our debt. They could bring us to our knees just by calling in that debt, without a shot fired.

Yes but don't overblow Gates' success here - IF he is successful in getting this proposal through Congress intact. The increase in funds "taking care of people" are not that significant in light of the total defense budget (but overall funding on manpower and training, etc, is significant - about a third). The "reform" measures redirect some programs, which is positive, but it's half a loaf - he could have easily done much more to cut back on/redirect the F-35 development, could have cut billions more off of missile defense, and didn't touch Marine Corps' programs (see EFV).

This is a compromise package intended to gain some support in Congress, but it is not the dramatic change of course that is required. More work is necessary, but it's not bad for baby steps in the right direction.

Whenever I hear talk about defense cuts jeopardizing, I think about the absolute size of the budget. Roughly $650B, or about double the rest of the world combined, and about 10x the next leading country's budget. If we can't halve that and still beat the living snot out of any other single country -- we are just plain doing something wrong.

I may be a little out of date on this, but my memory suggests that at one time every congressional district in the country had at least one defense contract. Talk about Pork and hard to break through. How do the administration propose to convince congress people to give up jobs and income in their districts? - Ted

How do the administration propose to convince congress people to give up jobs and income in their districts? - Ted

Obama has already taken the first step. In describing how the earmark process needs to be revised, he said they need to eliminate the type that specifies companies, thus eliminating the bidding process. There is a little less incentive to earmark money for an F-22, for example, if the DOD suddenly puts the plane and all its parts up for bid.

Putting "Bunny" Greenhouse back in her job at procurement in the pentagon would be a great first step at reigning in spending there.

I researched Star Wars/Missile Defense/NMD/etc. back during college (1987) and found that actually, the program goes back to the Eisenhower Administration, with an "on-spec" period between the ABM Treaty and Reagan's revival of the active program. For over half a century, we've been shoveling enormous amounts of money into a bottomless rat hole. True reform will have arrived when we finally cancel that useless boondoggle.

The Military-Industrial-CONGRESSIONAL complex is a big ugly bear that must be caged and controlled. It has terrorized the country since Ike's warning (truncated so as not to offend Congress).

]I'm sold on s/he as the proper pronoun to use. No more "he or she" for me.]

The way these things are assessed is the way any large program is assessed: by performance. America has a long history of putting money into defense programs that are not only costly, and have large cost overruns, but often don't work.

One simple way to improve this is to have time/cost penalties. Congress buys into the idea that someone like Boeing has the perfect weapons system? Fine. But give them a budget with time-cost overrun penalties. Even though it would inflate the upfront cost, the overall costs would go down. Another way of saying this is that we'd get costs closer to the true costs and we could then really do a cost-benefit analysis.

Not ready for a fixed cost? Then it's an R&D project, not a weapons buy.