The latest threat to the armed forces is budget
sequestration, and while the military is already finding ways to save money, it
needs to be looking closer at the long-term effects of the policies it is about
to put into place.
The Army has already managed to save seventy-one million dollars during fiscal year 2013 by diverting supplies from air transportation to surface transportation, but while grounding aircraft can save money in the short term it can be very expensive in the long run. During the Clinton budget-balancing of 1994, the Navy grounded several squadron’s of aircraft to help pay for peacekeeping missions. The problem with this is the cost to get grounded aircraft operational again. As the budget shrinks, things like maintenance are cut in order to save money immediately. The Navy has already announced plans to slash its maintenance budget by 40% during the second half of the fiscal year, cutting maintenance to 11 ships out of Norfolk Virginia alone. Once the money comes back, however, and you want to use those grounded aircraft, the cost of getting them operational again is severely more than providing the routine maintenance would have been. Retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, chief executive officer of the U.S. Naval Institute, compared it to taking care of your car: “"You might think you're saving money by not maintaining your car, but in the end, if you skip that 60,000-mile tune-up and end up losing a timing belt, you'll be sitting with a $2,400 bill to replace your engine. That's not very smart."
A potential bright side to sequestration could be the coalition and joint programs that the budget will force. The Patriot Missile system is widely acknowledged as being so good only because it was the combined effort of 11 nations who when working together were able to create a much better system at costs much lower than when the US takes on a project alone. Likewise, this could also mean that if we are forced to partner with other countries in order to create new technologies, our products may again be better and cheaper than if we worked on our own. Provided, of course, that we find ourselves willing to share this technology.
Is it possible to conduct lesser scaled maintenance, only focusing on the simple things such as oil and other fluids? Does the Army require the grounded aircraft sit in place untouched by soldiers? All of these are possible solutions to the problem of merely skipping regularly scheduled maintenance. In order for a cars timing belt to go out, it has to actually be in use. Grounding the aircraft does have maintenance issues involved, but treating the more common and use to do symptoms should not be terribly costly.
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