Military News
02-23-2010, 02:33 PM
02-23-2010 03:12 PM
A retired Marine who will be part of the independent panel reviewing the Quadrennial Defense Review said Tuesday that one of the best things about the new strategy and the 2011 defense budget is that they don’t talk about things like “transformation.”
Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee about the $708 billion defense budget, retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper said previous reviews and budgets were filled with “groundless assertions that there was an imperative to undertake fundamental change in the weapons, equipment, organization or doctrine of the U.S. military.”
“For a decade and a half, the U.S. military endured demands from senior defense leaders — supported by pundits on the sidelines — to undertake transformation for transformation’s sake alone,” Van Riper said. “The effect was to draw most of the services’ and joint community’s intellectual energies into fool’s work at the expense of thinking critically about how our forces might operate.
“In my view, the Department of Defense wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of transformation,” he said.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the budget committee chairman, said he thinks that is understated.
“Billions of dollars were wasted on a concept that didn’t have much meat on the bones,” Conrad said.
Van Riper said the 2011 budget is not perfect, but is “worthy in that it largely avoids focusing on many of the meaningless adjectives recently used to modify the nouns war and warfare: fourth-generation war, asymmetric war, net-centric warfare and so forth.
“We have squandered too much energy and too many resources in efforts to explain or define such terms when they are essentially meaningless,” he said.
The budget committee hearing focused on whether the 2011 defense request, marking the 14th consecutive year of increased military budgets, was realistic.
Conrad and the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said national security spending is a top budget priority, but they expressed doubts that this was a fat-free budget request that could not be reduced as part of a larger deficit-reduction effort.
“A dollar wasted on an inefficient defense program is still a dollar wasted,” Conrad said.
Gregg said one of the areas he wanted to look at for cuts was in “post-service” benefits, such as retired pay and health care.
More... (http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/02/military_transformation_criticism_022310w/)
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A retired Marine who will be part of the independent panel reviewing the Quadrennial Defense Review said Tuesday that one of the best things about the new strategy and the 2011 defense budget is that they don’t talk about things like “transformation.”
Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee about the $708 billion defense budget, retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper said previous reviews and budgets were filled with “groundless assertions that there was an imperative to undertake fundamental change in the weapons, equipment, organization or doctrine of the U.S. military.”
“For a decade and a half, the U.S. military endured demands from senior defense leaders — supported by pundits on the sidelines — to undertake transformation for transformation’s sake alone,” Van Riper said. “The effect was to draw most of the services’ and joint community’s intellectual energies into fool’s work at the expense of thinking critically about how our forces might operate.
“In my view, the Department of Defense wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of transformation,” he said.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the budget committee chairman, said he thinks that is understated.
“Billions of dollars were wasted on a concept that didn’t have much meat on the bones,” Conrad said.
Van Riper said the 2011 budget is not perfect, but is “worthy in that it largely avoids focusing on many of the meaningless adjectives recently used to modify the nouns war and warfare: fourth-generation war, asymmetric war, net-centric warfare and so forth.
“We have squandered too much energy and too many resources in efforts to explain or define such terms when they are essentially meaningless,” he said.
The budget committee hearing focused on whether the 2011 defense request, marking the 14th consecutive year of increased military budgets, was realistic.
Conrad and the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said national security spending is a top budget priority, but they expressed doubts that this was a fat-free budget request that could not be reduced as part of a larger deficit-reduction effort.
“A dollar wasted on an inefficient defense program is still a dollar wasted,” Conrad said.
Gregg said one of the areas he wanted to look at for cuts was in “post-service” benefits, such as retired pay and health care.
More... (http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/02/military_transformation_criticism_022310w/)
[Clicking on more will open up a popup box with the complete news story from the news source. MilitaryWoman.org is not responsible for content.]