It all gets down to Politics.
My impression of events is the Military is playing a game on Congress and the President with a view towards getting their budget made good again.
There was an article out this morning that pointed out some programs that both could be cut and some that need to be cut.
Lets look back at some of the spending that has gone on in the past few years with huge price tags and not a lot of promise or increased capability over current systems or weapons.
The Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program is a very good example of bad spending.
The USMC's hydro-plane Armored Amphibious Tractor Program was an un-mitigated disaster.
The F-35 Program is another program that has been a disaster....both in costs and questionable improvement over existing and much cheaper proven systems.
The US Navy insists on keeping their Ships deployed....steaming around the World and wearing them out doing so. That mindset has been under review since the 80's and was part of the Briefings I was privvy to regards the differences between the Soviet and American Navies.
The Army is being forced to up-date thousands of M-1 Abrams Tanks....and buy new ones....as a political deal.
The Coast Guard's procurement of a new line of Cutters has also been a disaster at no small expense.
What the Military is doing is cutting back on training, flying hours, some overhauls and some deployments, cutting Elementary Schools for Dependent Children and other tactics to create a false crisis.
One example of the problem.....the Joint Chiefs Staff has grown to almost 5,000 people in the Pentagon in the past few Years. Tell me that is not an indicator of the kind of management problem the Military has.
We have far more Generals/Admirals today than we did during WWII when we had almost 18,000,000 people in Uniform.
Here is one program that certainly could have been cancelled sooner.
Typo Leads To Creation Of $179M Gorilla Warfare Program | The Duffel Blog