Rebuilding our military

There many available articles describing our underfunded and overworked military forces.  Machines and the manpower operating them are tired, worn out, and in precariously low raw numbers.

We face the tyranny of time as it impacts correcting the problems from the past decades and multiple administrations.  

How to reduce the time it will take to rectify all the material challenges, let alone personnel readiness, seems to rest on massive budget shifts.  Away from social, pork, and nonessential programs and into national security.  This requires smart reallocation of resources, without increasing the size of the federal budget.  

A secondary benefit to this shift will accrue from the need for more workers to rebuild the material elements, as well as more people in uniform, increasing employment.  

Now the question becomes one of political will and national leadership.  Unfortunately, the political will appears absent.  And White House/POTUS national leadership are lacking.  Unlike Reagan's ability to work with Congress and communicate with the American people and the world almost four decades ago, Trump has not measured up.  Furthermore, with significantly fewer military veterans in Congress, understanding and appreciating the critical dilemma in which we find ourselves are missing or drowned out by hyper-partisanship.  

POTUS needs to step up, as does Congress -- specifically the GOP -- to invest in our national security.  The goal, as a fellow military retiree so aptly put it, is to have "the most lethal fighting force on the face of the earth by an order of magnitude."  

It is time to take out the red pen and identify the waste in the budget failing to support the entire nation, not the minuscule yet multiple special interests that fund elections and re-elections.  Some of what we read prior to the latest budget deal provided some hope.  For example, eliminating/severely reducing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and other line items.  Nice-to-have, not crucial need-to-have for the survival of the nation.  Across the federal budget, billions can be shifted without increasing the bottom line.  If done well, the annual budget can actually be reduced.  Sadly, it comes full circle to the issue of political will.

Other crucial actions, beyond just making funds available, include fixing the military procurement system; reducing/eliminating unnecessary elements in DoD (personnel reductions and associated O&M funding); streamlining the war fighting structure; and otherwise correcting the lopsided tooth-to-tail ratio.  Once more, political will and national leadership are needed.

Let us hope the leadership will step up and work to create the political will necessary to solve the problem.