An article over at the Army Times details some of what may be coming down as government, looking for places to cut, eyes the military:

…Speaking to reporters in Washington, Cartwright said the Defense Department’s internal planners are bracing for budget cuts far deeper than those announced by President Obama in April. Obama proposed carving $400 billion from the defense budget plan over the next 12 years, a cut of about 7 percent.

“The reality is, what you are most worried about a deeper cut? Is there another $400 billion behind the first $400 billion?” Cartwright said. “Now you start to look at things like, ‘Do I want to hollow out the force? Do I want to start to reduce the force size?’ ”…

There is no way around the fact that cuts are going to be made to Defense.  Part of this is the fact that we have a liberal, Democrat President and as they are always short-sighted, they see the defense budget as a bucket of money they can better use paying off cronies and special interests.  The other part of it, though, is the fact that we’re plain and simple broke – we don’t have enough money to keep spending on any department of government as much as we have been.  The problem is not in the fact of cuts, but how the cuts are to be made.

First and foremost, we must ensure that we maintain a military which is not just more powerful than any likely adversary, but so overwhelmingly powerful that any one who decides to fight us has just signed their own death warrant.  There can be no cuts which would reduce the level of training and readiness of the armed forces.  All members of the armed forces must be completely ready to go – down to the last detail – at a moments notice.  There can also be no cuts to the research and development needed to ensure our forces have the technological edge – though there can be a delay in deploying the new weapons; both in making the initial purchase and in fully equipping the entire armed forces with the new technology.

While there really can’t be cuts to pay and benefits, there can be a concerted effort to lower personnel costs.  We can, for instance, refuse to recruit people who are married and/or who have dependent children at the time of enlistment.  We can offer encouragement to longer enlistments, thus keeping both a highly professional force as well as lowering the very high cost of turning civilians in to soldiers (a longer term force need fewer recruits on an annual basis).  We can set up citizens militia units to take over continental defense in order to leave the regular military free to deploy – and thus we might be able to get away with a smaller overall military force (this is a revival of the old volunteer, part time military force which made up the bulk of our immediate reserve until the early 20th century when its functions were taken over by the National Guard…which has now become the ready-reserve for the active duty forces, and thus isn’t actually available for home defense – and the citizens militia could be activated for full time military service in a “world war” sort of emergency”).  We can also concentrate resources in those technologies which multiply the firepower of each individual service member – if our troops deploy, per man, 10 times the fire power of the enemy, then 1 of ours becomes worth 10 of theirs…and thus smaller expeditionary forces can be used.

The biggest caution I can relate is to remember what happened between the World Wars, especially during the Great Depression.  While spending bags of money, the government continually shrank the defense budget.  By the time we went to war in 1941, our soldiers on the front line were ill trained, forced to use obsolete weapons and were heavily outnumbered by the enemy – and we suffered crushing defeats because of it.  These defeats had to be paid for in rivers of blood later.  Defense must do its part to help repair the horrible state of our finances, but it is criminal folly to use Defense as a mere pot of money – the job Defense does it the primary and most important task of government and it must be able to do its job all the time and everywhere.