Trump.... what would turn supporters against him

I agree with you 100% about other nations military's being worse off. I too explained that in my original post about this. If we're hurting like this then I 100% guarantee that Russia and China are much worse off. They show off in their propaganda videos but we all know the truth. Yes Russia and China are powerful, regionally, but while they are probably a bigger threat than the general public gives them credit for, they aren't nearly as big of a threat as like try to portray.

I don't think we are spending too much, I think we need to reevaluate what we are spending it on in the military. It's a big cycle, the government tries to keep people employed so in turn we have things going on like the Army recently ordering hundreds more Abrams tanks from General Dynamics just to keep their factories open and keep people employed when we already have like 6000 of the things that we don't use. So yes we do waste a lot of money as well. It's partly because of the way the money is distributed. Hell I remember last year I walked into work and saw like 100 brand new nice computer chairs sitting in an empty room....and they sat in the empty room for like 6 months until somebody did something with them. No idea where they went. Why did we order those? Because we are budgeted a certain amount of money per fiscal year and if we don't spend it all then big Army thinks we don't need it so they give us less next year. So just in case we do need it next year we make sure to spend every dime they give us, even if it's on stupid stuff. Plus the way the money is broken down is confusing and I'll admit I don't understand it. But I find it stupid that we can somehow afford to buy a bunch of random computer chairs for no reason but we can't afford to order parts to fix our broken birds because that comes from a different budget or something. I don't know.

I'm no economist and I have no real idea who makes these decisions and the logic behind them when it comes to allocating money to the military. That sort of thing is way above my head and pay grade. But from my point of view I think the military needs to start allocating more money to training it's troops and ensuring they have all of the right equipment necessary to train rather than buying up random crap that we can't afford to fix when it breaks. There's no point in spending billions of dollars on a new piece of crap F-35 plane that everyone unanimously agrees is a piece of crap except the people who build them when we have a fleet of F/A-18 Super Hornets decaying because we can't afford engine parts. We're basically doing the illogical thing of moving into a mansion then figuring out later we can't afford the light bill every month. So in that aspect I agree with you, they should have scrapped that whole program that right there would have saved us billions. The thing sucks anyway. We could have used that money to better train our troops which is my next point.

We need to give troops an incentive to stick around and one big incentive to do that is money. One of the main reasons why we have such a huge gap in middle level experience is because the military itself simply cannot compete with the civilian sector when it comes to pay. Military pilots for example do alright for themselves pay wise but when compared to the civilian sector the salary we make is laughable. Outside of "serving your country" it becomes kinda hard to convince a pilot to stick around the military long when they can literally make twice the money as a civilian doing the same job....without the military part which includes things like PCS'ing every couple years and deploying all the time. That was another topic of discussion in the brief we had recently. We need to keep people around. And one good way to do that is to start giving reup bonuses again. As it stands now many folks will sign up to be a pilot and then bail out after their initial contract is up and go work for the civilian sector making twice the money. And with that persons departure goes their experience. It's a constant cycle of starting over with people because by the time we train somebody to be a good experienced veteran pilot they tend to leave and go work for Delta or something. So we have to become more competitive with the civilian sector in terms of pay. The deployments and constant moving around stuff is the military, no getting away from that, but we can at least try to make it more appeasing by offering people huge bonuses to keep them and their experience around longer. So instead of spending thousands of dollars on a bunch of computer chairs and billions of dollars on a piece of crap airplane that nobody wants we should reallocate that money to the troops themselves so they don't keep leaving the second their contract is up and taking their gained experience with them to the civilian sector.

So long story short, no I don't believe we spend too much on the military, I believe we waste too much money on stupid stuff in the military that would be much better spent on the troops themselves. The equipment that we have now is good, we just need to spend money to keep it operational and stop ordering MORE of it when the stuff we already have doesn't even work half the time. And for the love of God get rid of that stupid F-35 plane.

So my solution. Rebuild the military to the point where we are able to fight 2 full scale conventional wars on 2 fronts (thats basically what the goal of the military is in case people didn't know, so when we are talking about troop levels and readiness and all that we are talking about being able to do a WWII style scenario in todays times.) Once we get back to that point, figure out how much it costs to keep it that way, then keep the budget at that point, then stop ordering new crap like the F-35 and 500 more freaking tanks, and give the rest of the money we were going to spend on more planes and tanks to the troops themselves via bonuses so that they will stick around. That way we will maintain an experienced military able to fight and win a full scale conventional war on two fronts tomorrow if necessary.

But it likely won't happen. The Pentagon gets its rocks off on shiny new toys and seem to be oblivious of the fact that they need experienced people to operate this stuff. Every time I think they might be getting their act together they do something stupid again like implement this new military retirement policy which is basically a 401k program instead of a pension. The military as a career is painful. It has it's perks but overall it's a hard life. The government seems to think that people stick around due to patriotism and all that stuff. Which some do yes, but what keeps most people around until retirement is the very attractive 20 year 50% pension for life. Take that away from people and once again the troops are going to say screw this im not staying for 20 years this life sucks, which it does. So in turn their goes their experience, and we are right back at square one again. All because "we can't afford it".

We can't afford to pay service members retirement pensions anymore but we can afford to spend billions of dollars on a piece of crap fighter jet that nobody wants. That's where our money is going, it's not that we have too large of a military budget we just seemingly have amateurs managing the military budget which is why it seems like we are spending too much.

My biggest priority is experienced troops. Whatever Trump and Mattis just did is giving us the green light to train more experienced troops. That's what I think is important. And since the Pentagon loves buying fancy new crap all the time then I guess the only way to allow us to train our troops is to increase the defense budget again to give more money to the units AND allow the Pentagon to buy their fancy new toys. This is the best we can do I suppose. I wish we'd stop buying stuff and use THAT money to train the troops but they won't do that so our only option is to increase the budget because they are the ones who make the rules not me.

 

Well honestly this sort of thing is one of the main reasons I am a huge supporter of General Mattis. He has always been a "Marine's General" which means he spent much of his time caring for his troops personally. Unlike many others who reach his position in high brass he actually spent a lot of his time among the troops and there are stories abound about him volunteering to do normal everyday troop duties even as a General. Such as sitting at a desk during Christmas time on staff duty so one of his troops didn't have to spend Christmas at work instead of at home. I personally never met the man, but I have a good buddy who served under his command as a marine who can attest that he was a very highly respected leader who seemingly cared and LISTENED to his troops. So I hope he carries that mentality with him as Sec Def and takes the time to come down and actually talk to the common troops about the issues we face and what we think needs fixing.

Like you said it's bureaucratic bull(*)(*)(*)(*) and all too often people get up in the ranks and forget about those many levels below them. They see the military as one huge game of numbers and data sheets and forget that there are actually people who make up those numbers. A lot of high brass views the military in terms of huge "operational units". Oh we need more air support in Iraq? Send this squadron over there. That's all they see, they don't see the fact that "this squadron" is staffed full of pilots who graduated flight school yesterday, they just see "squadron" and "aircraft"...go fight.

Mattis SEEMS to be the kind of guy who will look beyond the numbers and go down to the units PAST the guys with stars on their shoulders and ask the units themselves "Alright guys what's going on? What do we need to fix?" Or at least staff his department with those who would do such things.

It's gotten to the point where I don't even know if these folks up there honestly understand the negative effects of the decisions they are making in regards to their own military. I mean perhaps they are making the right choices and I just don't understand it. I'm no General, I'm not even a Commander, I'm just the average pilot in a random unit and I don't claim to be anything other than that or claim to be smarter than these guys who obviously did something right to become Generals. But from my perspective this stuff doesn't make sense. We are spending so much money on stuff while neglecting the core aspect of the military itself, the troops.

Thats why I said originally that the one thing that would without a doubt turn me off of Trump would be if he went back on his word to look out for us. That was the main selling point he had in my book and is the main thing I personally support about him. He's dumping more money into the defense budget, which unfortunately means the Pentagon will probably misuse it and start buying more useless crap, BUT, it also means the troops themselves are being able to effectively train finally. Everyone at work was ecstatic when we heard that we were getting virtually unlimited flight time now. Our young pilots, who rarely ever flew at all, were the happiest of the bunch. They finally get to fly. Plus the military also implemented some more reenlistment bonuses for our enlisted folks meaning if they decide to stick around they will get a pretty hefty bonus. Overnight I literally saw a bunch of lower enlisted guys who were set on getting out after their contract was up suddenly decide to stick around. And by them sticking around we get to keep their experience, and they can train others, it's great and better for our unit and the military as a whole.

I also read that Trump renegotiated that piece of crap F-35 contract to make it cost less or something like that. I don't know what he did, or who was all involved, I'm no economist, but whatever they did was the right call in my book. Stop pouring so much money into that damn plane, it costs too much and it's not even good at anything. The Pentagon was ready to do what they always do when they salivate over shiny new toys, just keep spending the money that we don't have regardless because they want it because it's shiny and pretty and new. I guess Trump or somebody in his administration told them to knock that crap off for a change or told Lockheed Martin that if they don't lower the cost of that stupid thing we aren't buying any. That was great. The damn Pentagon would spend the entire defense budget to get their new shiny toy if thats what it took. I'm glad Trump stepped in and said hell no.

Somebody needed to step in and regulate our spending on these types of things. If America magically came upon like 500 quadrillion dollars then the Pentagon would ask Boeing to build them the freakin Death Star and park it out there next to the moon. There'd be like 12 people on the whole thing but they'd build one because somehow in their minds they would figure out a reason why that would make sense. We need somebody to put the brakes on these guys every once and awhile. Trump SEEMS to be doing that, at least with that stupid F-35 program.

This is what we NEEDED, and I mean badly. And I've seen it with my own eyes over the past few weeks and I can tell you personally that it's working. If he suddenly decided to turn this around and do a complete 180 then I would be livid, and he would lose my support immediately.