--- title: Can the Military Cut Excess Spending? | TIME description: Is trimming the Department of Defense's budget as simple as identifying waste, fraud and abuse? canonical: https://time.com/video/dxJG2a6h/ og:title: Can the Military Cut Excess Spending? og:description: Is trimming the Department of Defense's budget as simple as identifying waste, fraud and abuse? og:url: https://time.com/video/dxJG2a6h/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/dxJG2a6h/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Can the Military Cut Excess Spending? twitter:description: Is trimming the Department of Defense's budget as simple as identifying waste, fraud and abuse? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/dxJG2a6h/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Can the Military Cut Excess Spending? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Can the Military Cut Excess Spending? [Watch (HLS stream): Can the Military Cut Excess Spending?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/dxJG2a6h.m3u8) (3:41)  _Published 2011-10-10. Is trimming the Department of Defense's budget as simple as identifying waste, fraud and abuse?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:18 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [House's Budget Increases Military Spending, Slashes Medicare and Medicaid](/video/Y3Pp2Bj4/) ### House's Budget Increases Military Spending, Slashes Medicare and Medicaid [What You Need to Hear in the Defense's Closing Arguments](/video/PWIxB3MU/) ### What You Need to Hear in the Defense's Closing Arguments [Could Budget Cuts Cripple the Department of Defense?](/video/9ueoVGlr/) ### Could Budget Cuts Cripple the Department of Defense? --- ## Transcript This is Command Post, a series of discussions about military matters from Time and The Center for A New American Security. Todd, a lot of times when people talk about cutting the military budget, you know, they would always rely on, " Well, you know, if we cut waste, fraud and abuse, everything will be wonderful ." Tell us how likely, or possible, it is. For the U. S. military to do what needs to be done by cutting in those categories, and if those categories are only a piece of the answer, where do you think the bigger answers will come from? Well if there's a, a magical line item in the budget called waste, fraud, and abuse, I'd like someone to show it to me, cuz I haven't been able to find it. You know, there's a lot of talk about you know, cutting waste out of DOD, and there certainly is waste at DOD, just like there is in any other organization, you know. Except our think tank. Of course. In time. Very least, yes. Of course, of course. Yes. Our organizations are lean but, you know, every sec that comes in has talked about cutting waste out of the defense budget. And you know, you look at previous effort, including the current efficiency initiative, you can identify a lot of waste, but getting rid of it, is really tough. And seldom do the savings pan out like we think they're going to. A pretty good analogy is, it's not like the fat in the defense budget. It's a thin layer of fat around the edge of a piece of meat that you can trim off nicely. The fat's marbled into the meat, so when you try to go after it sometimes you end up cutting good meat with it. The type of cuts that we're talking, there's no way that you can do it with waste fraud abuse. I agree with that, but there's also a lot of redundancy in the Department of Defense. We're not talking about things that are, are wasteful, but have been deliberately designed. To be redundant. That is a potential area for cost savings. Probably not as much as it might be on paper, because there are, within costs integrating into developing the new systems and so on. So, the, the Navy has it's own Air Force and the Navy has it's own Army and the United States Marines has their own Army as well. Right. There are good strategic reasons for some redundancies. You know, there's technological breakthrough that enables your adversary to disarm the systems on one particular set of aircraft. So that's why I make a distinction. We're not talking about waste here. Redundancy is a different thing. But you're going to see more and more pressures on those kinds of things, even when there is a useful purpose for that redundancy. One Air Force officer recently told me, I thought he put it well, he said, you know, we either have to learn how to change the way we do business Or change the business we do. fundamentally, DoD's gotta start to rethink a lot of the things that they do right now. And if they don't change what they're doing, they're not gonna be able to do all of these things, in the future. That's just a fact of life. Well speaking of redundancy, certainly we've got the strategic nuclear triad. Bombers, ICBMs and submarines. Admiral Mullen recently said, well, maybe time to start thinking about a dyad, do you think that's a, a realistic option? Well, you know, I've started looking at this from a budget perspective, and clearly, the most resilient part of the triad are the boomers. The submarine- based missiles, because they can hide very effectively. So, you know, that's the most resilient one, you wanna keep that. And then you look, okay, well, the other two legs are bombers and your land- based ICBMs. Well, your bombers are flexible because you can use them for other missions, other than nuclears. And we've used B52s, for instance, in conventional wars included Desert Storm. Exactly. So we're using them all the time. The B2s we used in in Tripoli in Libya just recently. So then you look at the ICBMs and say, okay, well maybe we get rid of that leg. Maybe it's the weakest leg, but it doesn't actually save you that much money to get rid of the ICBMs. You're only talking about one or two billion a year in operational costs that you would save from eliminating that leg. So, it may look good on paper, that hey, we can go down to any player [ INAUDIBLE ] but I don't know that you're gonna get the savings that you want in the end. 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