Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.) Signs Open Letter Warning of Imbalances in Defense Budget

Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.) Signs Open Letter Warning of Imbalances in Defense Budget

May 1, 2015

Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.), Senior Advisor at the National Security Network, signed an open letter calling for Defense and Congressional leaders to address “growing imbalances within the defense budget that threaten the health and viability of America’s military power.” The letter, a part of the Defense Reform Consensus project, included 38 signatories from 15 think tanks and universities, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Significant quotes from the letter:

too much of the defense budget is currently consumed by institutional inefficiencies, some of which are mandated by law. This is leaving a smaller share of the budget to pay for the manning, training and equipping of our armed forces that make the US military without peer.

 

The Pentagon’s first four BRAC rounds are producing an annual recurring savings of around $8 billion…Estimates remain constant that the Pentagon retains over excess [basing] capacity here in the US.

 

from 2001 to 2015, the active duty military shrank by nearly 3 percent. Yet over the same timeframe the number of civilian defense employees grew by 10 percent to 756,000. This workforce rose another 3 percent in just the past year” and consumed “76 billion of the defense budget in 2015

To read the letter, click here.