The Pentagon Being Asked to Tighten Its Belt — Finally

This is good news — nowhere near enough, though — but this is genuinely a good direction.

According to the NYT today, SecDef Robert Gates is asking the entire DOD to find billions of dollars in cuts to help fund the wars that they are in:

His goal is $7 billion in spending cuts and efficiencies for 2012, growing to $37 billion annually by 2016.

Every modern defense secretary has declared war on Pentagon waste and redundancy. And there have been notable, but relatively narrow successes, in closing and consolidating military bases or in canceling a handful of weapons systems.

But if Mr. Gates’s sweeping plan is fully enacted, none of the armed services or Pentagon civilian agencies and directorates would be immune from the pain of annual cost-cutting, which would become institutionalized across the Defense Department.

Asking the Pentagon to rethink its priorities and to find real funds — not just efficiencies, but programs to end — is an excellent beginning to asking the biggest discretionary drain on taxpayer funds to find ways to live with less. The savings realized will go to funding current war activity, which isn’t so promising, but as an exercise in incentives is quite good. Deleting programs is long-term savings (and long-term policy change) which is exactly the direction the DOD should be thinking of. Getting these savings through this Congress will be incredibly hard — but certainly all of those who are mouthing the words about a government spending too much ought to find some light in the DOD looking to find their share of spending to cut.