{"id":19440,"date":"2013-03-15T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T05:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19440"},"modified":"2013-03-14T14:24:55","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T19:24:55","slug":"the-real-cuts-to-the-military-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/15\/the-real-cuts-to-the-military-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"The real cuts to the military budget"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>Maclean&#8217;s<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2013\/03\/14\/cutting-where-it-hurts-most\/\" target=\"_blank\">John Geddes<\/a> examines the way budget cutbacks are being implemented in Canada&#8217;s military:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Perry\u2019s fine-grained analysis starts by setting aside the major parts of defence spending that are, at least in theory, protected from cuts. Last year\u2019s fiscal plan called for more than $1 billion a year to be cut from the defence department\u2019s overall budget of more than $20 billion by 2014-15. That doesn\u2019t seem so tough. But the Conservatives pledged to do that while keeping up the troop strength of the Canadian Forces, at about 68,000 regular members and 27,000 in the reserves, and also protecting most planned capital spending. According to Perry, that means about $12 billion a year was deemed uncuttable \u2014 leaving all the reductions to be found somehow in the remaining $8 billion that is spent on the civilian workforce and on military \u201coperations, maintenance and readiness.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How hard is it to achieve those savings? The clearest indication so far came from Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, the commander of the army, in surprising testimony he gave late last year before a Senate committee. Devlin said his land force\u2019s operating budget has been shrunk by an eye-popping 22 per cent\u2014a figure that doesn\u2019t show up anywhere in publicly available defence documents. \u201cAs you would expect,\u201d Devlin said with classic officer-class understatement, \u201cthat has an effect on people, infrastructure and training.\u201d And he took pains to counter any suggestion that the army should be eliminating desk jobs to save field assets, stressing that administrative and head-office functions occupy only four per cent of his workforce.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Harper\u2019s letter echoed the thrust of Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie\u2019s 2011 \u201ctransformation\u201d report. Leslie, who has since retired, conducted an extensive study of defence spending and concluded that the department must \u201cruthlessly focus\u201d on reducing its spending on outside consultants and private contractors, with the aim of redistributing resources to military units. He delivered his report two years ago. Yet the latest figures available show that the defence department\u2019s spending on professional services and consultants continued to climb to $3.25 billion in 2011-12 from $2.77 billion in 2009-10. And that increase came after a period when head-office growth outstripped the expansion of the fighting forces. According to Leslie\u2019s report, headquarters personnel numbers grew 40 per cent from 2004 to 2010, while the regular forces grew by just 11 per cent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Maclean&#8217;s, John Geddes examines the way budget cutbacks are being implemented in Canada&#8217;s military: Perry\u2019s fine-grained analysis starts by setting aside the major parts of defence spending that are, at least in theory, protected from cuts. Last year\u2019s fiscal plan called for more than $1 billion a year to be cut from the defence [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[31,697,214,745,258],"class_list":["post-19440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-military","tag-army","tag-budget","tag-rcaf","tag-rcn","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-53y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19441,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19440\/revisions\/19441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}