Could military spending cuts help us to create a more effective military? Here is my cross-post that argues that soft budget constraints create bad incentives and plenty of inefficiency.
One thought on “A Lean and Mean Military?”
Comments are closed.
It’s really too bad the quality of discussion in that post is so low. Pentagon-watchers have been discussing these questions for about 40 years (with lots of answers that involve congressional committee chairs and other chokepoints). Analysts inside and outside the military have produced endless white papers, some of them quite sensible, about just what the US military’s mission is or should be — in detail — to maximize national security. There are whole books about the procurement process and how different weapons systems and different contractors get chosen, not to mention about the cost structure of military contracting (both nominal and real).
The first question out of the gate, about the degree to which workers at defense plants are unionized, is interesting in a way, because large-establishment surveys have in at least some cases shown that productivity is maximized when workers are in unions and management cooperates with those unions. Yet the current legislative trend is apparently to inhibit unionization.