{"id":186060,"date":"2014-05-24T05:03:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T10:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/24\/our-dysfunctional-pentagon\/"},"modified":"2014-05-24T05:03:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-24T10:03:00","slug":"our-dysfunctional-pentagon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/24\/our-dysfunctional-pentagon\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Dysfunctional Pentagon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Winslow Wheeler at <i>War is Boring<\/i> makes an interesting point about the sequestration games that the Department of Defense is engaging in: Iit is <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/war-is-boring\/e93d0a33f4a6\">systematically cutting cheaper and more effective programs in favor of expensive systems<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">There has been a short-sighted eagerness in some news articles and commentaries to disparage two actions by the House Armed Services Committee in the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The HASC seeks to retain in the military force structure the Air Force\u2019s A-10 Warthog close support aircraft and the Navy\u2019s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington. The Air Force and the Navy want to retire these systems prematurely, thereby seeming to save money.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But the longer-term game being played is to smooth the way for far more expensive, truly unaffordable, replacements the Air Force and Navy have cued up. And in the case of the A-10, the older, cheaper alternative is the inestimably more effective one.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Like, I said, it&#8217;s not about defending our nation, it&#8217;s about our Generals getting lucrative post retirement consulting gigs.<\/p>\n<p>That old Iron Triangle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Winslow Wheeler at War is Boring makes an interesting point about the sequestration games that the Department of Defense is engaging in: Iit is systematically cutting cheaper and more effective programs in favor of expensive systems: There has been a short-sighted eagerness in some news articles and commentaries to disparage two actions by the House &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,970,1008],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-corruption","category-defense-procurement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186060"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}