And you thought defense spending is too high?

• gut

  Wow. The numbers in this article are just sickening. The inefficiency of our defense spending is simply astounding. Such a great, detailed example of how bigger govt just sucks the life out of our economy like a giant leech. This illustrates perfectly how govt flushes money down the toilet on people who push paper, rather than create productive value.
  
  Many numbers I could highlight here, but this is the one that jumps out:
  "While the fighting forces have steadily shrunk by more than half since the early 1990s, the civilian and uniformed bureaucracy has more than doubled. According to the latest figures, there are currently more than 1,500,000 full-time civilian employees in the Defense Department—800,000 civil servants and 700,000 contract employees. Today, more than half of our active-duty servicemen and women serve in offices on staffs."
  
  
  Well, it's a WSJ article that you need access to read, so some more interesting numbers:
  1) Although current U.S. spending on defense adjusted for inflation has been higher than at the height of the Reagan administration, it has been producing less than half of the forces and capabilities of those years. Instead of a 600-ship Navy, we now have a 280-ship Navy, although the world's seas have not shrunk and our global dependence has grown. Instead of Reagan's 20-division Army, we have only 10-division equivalents. The Air Force has fewer than half the number of fighters and bombers it had 30 years ago.
  
  2) Air Force fighter planes today average 28 years old.
  
  3) The number of various Joint Task Force staffs, for instance, has grown since 1987 from seven to more than 250, according to the Defense Business Board.
  
  4) Each 7,000 civilian reductions saves at least $5 billion over five years [- which, by my math, means a doubling of these positions costs @ $70B a year]
• HitsRus

  

  ....and we buy helicopters from Russia.
  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-12/world/40533068_1_rosoboronexport-afghanistan-sanctions
  
  Leaking real jobs wherever we can....
• gut

  I mean, I thought defense spending was wasteful but:
  1) higher (adjusted for inflation) than it was under Reagan during the Cold War arms race
  2) troops and equipment are halved while bureaucracy doubles.
  
  800k civil servants are going to be 800k pensions one day.
  
  Scary to think DoD might not even be the most inefficient govt organization.
• Devils Advocate

  

  If you cut their budget by a third, I would bet they get really efficient....really fast.
• sleeper

  

  Having worked with government customers, specifically DoD customers, I can tell you they could cut staff by 20% and you wouldn't notice a difference. The government always has contractors do 99% of the work and they just sit on their behinds and manage/approve things; there's virtually no value added.
• sleeper

  

  To give you an example of waste, my last project our client wanted EVERYTHING we did put on a calender as to when we received the data, when we started the work, how long it took us, internal due dates, and external due dates. On top of maintaining this calender(which mind you can't even fit on a calender), we had to write a guidebook on every task we performed; how to do it, where we got the data, who has answers to the questions, etc. This entire tasking took up a majority of my time and since most of my work is adhoc every time I was tasked with something I had to update the calender and write a guidebook, effectively making everything I do take 1.5x the work all so a manager(not even my client, but my client's boss) could know what everyone was working on and how they did it.
  
  I actually suggested that since we work every day with the client, if his boss wanted to know anything he could simply ask the client instead of us maintaining and updating useless guidebooks(They were seriously useless as none of my team put any effort into them) and updating a calender that was impossible to read and changed all the time.