Streamline the U.S. Military Budget

Trillions of dollars can solve a lot of unemployment problems.

Threadhop: I saw Barkey's comment on military cooks Food Preparation Specialists and had to chime in...

When we had a month-long training exercise out on Pakaloa Training Area (Big Island, Hawaii), we actually had a field kitchen set up by the Battalion HQ. It was ran by military cooks. Since they were B-rations, it's not terribly difficult to prepare and serve - dunk the tray in hot water, let it heat up, rip the foil top of and bam, you got a gigantic Stouffers dinner for a bunch of guys (and it may explain why I like Stouffers frozen dinners to this day). The dinner entrées were quite good, considering field conditions, but the breakfast stuff was not.

Back when I was active duty, we actually had for-real military cooks working our chow halls at Schofield Barracks. I wasn't aware that this was a lost art - some of those cooks really do know how to cook.

Plus, Battle Mac just wouldn't be the same if it was made by some civilian.

A lot of our military costs can be lessened by merely reducing waste. Stuff that technically ins't fraud waste and abuse under current definitions could be, if people realized that it's not required to spend money of office furniture or things just because you got money to spend.

If it still works and isn't obsolete, don't chuck it.

Much better to simply buy things than spend it on people.

Good Reason to hang onto our nukes for the time being

Further into the future when the world has much less turmoil we probably won't need them. But that is being overly optimistic.

We really need to start cutting the private interests out of the military with a hatchet if necessary.

I've heard some morons within our own military saying the same things (“Let's nuke Tora Bora!”,) but nobody in the executive branch will give such idiocy the time of day, and I imagine the same goes for Russia.

Besides, the REAL reason to hang onto them is in case those uppity Martians try to start something… Or was that bioweapons?

Except we are not Russia and in Russia the military and it's various remnants from the previous era still have a crap load of influence within the state. They also are a lot less shy about heavy handed measures including ones such as nuclear deterrent to any foreign incursion.

Either way, I don't recall anyone saying we should dump ALL our nukes, just NEARLY all of them. We have to keep a symbolic MAD stockpile, after all, but I'm pretty sure we have far more than that on hand still.

the most obvious solution◊

We have more than enough nukes to glass the planet.

At the very very least we can cut down to enough nukes to glass, say, half the planet. Destructive redundancy is pointless.

I would need to see numbers to believe that.

^^

But our glass planet would be a beautiful marvel, we would leave a legacy!

We hardly have enough to glass the planet. Remember the U.S. tends to use the smaller nukes. The Russians are the fans of holy shit my nukes explosions touches the upper layers of the atmosphere weapons. Just hang on to what we got. Scrap them on a we need the parts for other stuff basis. The set up we have now is fine and is already a reduced arsenal.

Cut private interests first and minimize the waste at the decision level ie the civilian leadership directing the money into the pockets of private interests.

I'd rather just execute the civilian leadership then pass laws preventing them from making those kinds of decisions.

@ Barkey: When did you become Dr. Manhattan?

@ TH: Why not recycle them in fast breeder reactors for cheap electricity?

edited 19th Feb '11 2:32:24 PM by RadicalTaoist

Am I the only one who is sick of Education getting cut after cut after cut after cut, while it seems in some circles, mentioning military cuts is taboo?

Maybe I don't know enough? Because thats what I've seen.

(I'm a bit bitter of my new governor cutting the living shit out of our education budget)

That's a state budgeting thing, while the military is national, I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

edited 19th Feb '11 1:56:50 PM by Lanceleoghauni

I could go for that idea. Slowly reducing the stock pile to fuel breeder reactors as they are built.

I used to think we had preposterously more nukes than we could ever possibly need, enough to "glass" the planet.

Then I read this (from a different source I couldn't locate this time) and I realized why we have so many nukes (it's mostly covered in section 2, if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The basic gist is that nuclear weapons are a lot less destructive than people think.

edited 19th Feb '11 4:25:50 PM by deathjavu

If it's the papers I think they are, all three are linked on Subject 101 for "Nuclear War 101".

Ah, there they are. I knew I'd been linked there from T Vtropes the first time.

edited 19th Feb '11 4:42:36 PM by deathjavu

Also note American Nuclear weapons very rarely reach into the Megaton range.

The Russian Nuclear weapons frequently hit megaton power loads. By comparison we wanted a more surgical kind of devastation. The Russians wanted to hammer everything flat in a great fiery wave.

I wonder how many of our missiles we would have to scrap to get enough material to start a breeder reactor?

edited 19th Feb '11 5:29:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Yeah, that article actually talks about how higher energy nuclear bombs don't scale up well in terms of destruction. 2 500 kiloton bombs are actually quite a bit more destructive than a single megaton bomb.

edited 19th Feb '11 8:51:50 PM by deathjavu

Not that many. Nuclear weapons fuel is much denser than reactor fuel.

Most city strikers are done by MIRV's because a bunch of small warheads have a much larger "footprint" than one big one. Cluster Bombs operate on the same principle.

edited 19th Feb '11 9:03:45 PM by Deboss

Does anyone else find it emblematic that a thread which started as a question about what the least practical parts of the military budget are, ended up as arguing as to how many times over we can nuke the planet into oblivion using the garbage left from the Cold War?

Oblivion is an overestimate purported by the ignorant and the mentally deficient. Civilization as we know it would be gone. Humanity would most likely survive.