With the congressional supercommittee's failure to reach a deficit deal likely triggering roughly $1 trillion in defense spending cuts over the next decade, the battle is beginning over what exactly to put on the chopping block.
While no one knows yet which projects will take the hardest hits, the military's energy programs promise to be a place budgeteers will turn to both for savings and for cuts/…/For nearly a year now, the military has been counting in its budget calculations the amount of fuel -- and money -- it could save with tweaks to how it flies people and equipment around the world. In January, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced $500 million in such fuel savings as part of a department-wide effort to shrink overhead costs.
"I wouldn't call that a drop in the bucket, considering this is something you can do with hardly any operational impact," said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan military policy think tank. "No one loses their job; there's no angry constituency out there telling Congress not to do this. This is a win-win for everyone/…/""There are things that you can do that save a lot of money in the long-term that don't impact your operations, but to do that takes an investment," said defense budget analyst Harrison. "The big decision we face in the next year or two is, are we going to take more pain now in order to get more efficient over the long term, or are we going to focus on short-term savings that end up costing us more over the long term?"