Comments on: Army a ‘Cinderella service’

By: TZ

TZ — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:46:27 +0000

Ah yes… the poor poor Army.. no fancy equipment… always lacking funds… As a Marine I find that laughable. Remember the Navy’s budget goes for both the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps has been doing more with less for almost our entire history. We always marvel at the quality of the Army equipment and how the Army gets all the fancy toys when we are flying around in Vietnam-era helicopters and armored (if you can call it that) vehicles almost as old. We still do well though! What the Army misses is that it is about the people, and there should be a lot less Power Pointers and a lot more warriors. All the equipment in the world doesnt make a difference if the people running it can’t fight effectively with it. The Air Force’s budget does need to be trimmed, expecially some of their more extravagant quality of life measures. But we also need to remember that we have total dominance in the sea and air– but that is not a permanent fact. If we forget those branches, someone will give us a run for our money in them, and unecessarily so. So as for the Army being the Cinderella service though? I think not. The Army needs to spend some more money on things like marksmanship– you know the basic skills of infantry combat– before they try to become “Star Wars” come down to earth with a lot of suppliers and a couple Jedi Knights.

By: Robot.Economist

Robot.Economist — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:04:22 +0000

As someone who writes actual reports for the Army, I too think we could afford to trim the Powerpoint MOS from the personnel system. We could also afford to scale back some FCS as well.
The Army has a tendency to plan for too many platforms and FCS is no exception. Their idea of transformation frequently involves giving older weapons platforms a new spin instead of abandoning them wholesale (think of the canceled Crusader self-propelled howitzer).

By: Sven Ortmann

Sven Ortmann — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:35:20 +0000

Aside from the cover-up of waste, there’S one serious quote in the text:
“When you go to war with a $56 billion deficit in equipment, you have to aggregate that equipment and push it forward to the war, which means that on the backside, you now have issues in training, you have issues in reconstitution and reset.“
This qualifiesn Schoomaker as incompetent for being a field officer.
Equipment cannot make up for lack of training or suboptimal training quality. So training is first, equipment second.
By the way, I’ve heard that a possible approach on army savings might be to reduce the personnel employed specifically for making fancy powerpoints…

By: Hoax Meister

Hoax Meister — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:35:18 +0000

I agree the Army definitely has been getting shorted on the funds over the past decade. However, I do think Schoomaker is putting too many eggs in one basket by pitching the $250B FCS program.
A better solution would be along the lines of what I believe Germany has done by taking the overall program and splitting into smaller more manageable pieces. This might actually be more productive as well for the Army, since they could focus on specific needs(replacement for M-16/M-4, better body armour) instead of a massive program. It’s easier to sell Congress on the idea of a better assualt rifle–harder to sell that overall package, especially with record deficits and overall debt.

By: Robot.Economist

Robot.Economist — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:28:36 +0000

Bob Work from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments commented to me offhand a few weeks ago that Schoomaker’s hissy fit over $25 billion to the OMB would open the door to a very public “phalus measuring contest” between the services. I agreed with him, but didn’t think things would degenerate so quickly.
Does this renewed infighting mark the end of the 1/3–1/3–1/3 budget era? To be honest, I would confine Army, Navy and Air Force to a room and force them to collectively hash out future FYDPs, POMs and procurement plans with fixed toplines. The Goldwater-Nichols Act may have instilled a joint operational attitude, but the services are still too parochial when it comes to everything else.

By: jtw

jtw — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:32:31 +0000

How can you receive 600 billion dollars every year + 100’s of billions in war funding and complain that you do not have enough funding to go around? I would complain about the high cost of equipment and the defense industry’s high profits, not complain about how much money you are receiving. If you do not have enough money you are not spending it correctly.