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Washington
Times
An
open letter to Secretary
of Defense Chuck Hagel
The truth about military
personnel costs
By Norb Ryan Jr.
Monday,
March 11, 2013
Dear
Secretary Hagel,
As
a former soldier and
senator, you are well-prepared for what you might encounter as you
begin your
new job. It won’t be easy, and the hardest part will be separating fact
from
fiction to make the best decisions.
Here
is some advice. The
most important thing you can do is challenge the “experts” who use
misleading
rhetoric and statistics to sway you toward their conclusions.
You’ll
hear that military
personnel costs are “rising out of control” and will “consume future
defense
budgets.” Bean-counters use these bogus arguments – and pundits repeat
them —
to divert money from military people programs to hardware or
non-defense
programs.
Yet
those arguments simply
aren’t true.
Here
are the facts:
The
defense budget has
consumed a progressively smaller share of federal outlays. Today, it’s
at its
smallest share in 50 years and will drop further – below 12.5 percent –
by
2017. That share is projected to continue to decline for the
foreseeable
future.
Defense
leaders complain
military personnel and health costs are consuming roughly one-third of
the
defense budget – implying this is a dramatic increase from the past.
Yet
personnel and health
care costs have comprised that same budget share consistently for the
last 30
years. They’re no more unaffordable now than in the past.
Moreover,
this is a bargain
when compared to the most similar corporations.
Personnel
costs comprise 61
percent of the budget for United Parcel Service, 43 percent for FedEx
and 31
percent for Southwest Airlines.
Your
predecessors
complained health care costs approach 10 percent of the non-war defense
budget.
However, health costs comprise 23 percent of the federal budget, 22
percent of
the average state budget, 16 percent of household discretionary
spending and 16
percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. By comparison, Defense’s 10
percent is
modest…
Read
the rest of the article at the Washington
Times
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