"So reads a headline from this morning's Washington Times, and while it does me no good within the 'vast right-wing conspiracy', I am inclined to agree with them, though the Devil as they say, is in the details.  What Larry Korb, John Podesta and Barney Frank all have in common (besides presenting a pretty reliable bellwether of what NOT to do on most things) is that they approach DoD as if it were an ATM, sitting there chock full or money just waiting to subsidize the rest of the economy.  Their collective desires to denude DoD of nearly $1 trillion spring not from a sense of what is best for the national defense of the US strategically, but primarily from the standpoint of how to find money within the existing discretionary budget to keep from making real choices on entitlements.

How then, do I agree with them?  Well, I believe that a roughly $600B base budget for defense is unquestionably too much.  How can I say this?  Because I watch the sausage get made, and I see the inefficiency.  Not Bob Gates inefficiency, mind you, where bureaucrats chase around overhead reductions that invariably will have to be reversed at some point--but inefficiency born of cowardice.  And in this case, it is cowardice wrapped in the fuzzy mantle of 'Jointness', wherein as long as no service deigns to make its case more loudly than the others, none has to make any really tough choices.  And as long as the Services aren't making noise, OSD doesn't have to referee any unseemly behavior.

Yes indeed--there's a conspiracy of silence at work in the Pentagon, an omerta-like code that promotes unity above strategy, duplication above decision, and conformity above economy."

[hat tip to The Dish which includes this graph:]