Marcus Aurelius: Washington Times NAILS the Pentagon for Lack of Integrity — a Total Government Shut-Down for 22 Days, with Documented Cause & Effect Might Shock & Awe

Corruption, Idiocy, Military
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Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

(1) I don't know whether this article's headline is accurate or not; I'd like to think it is.

(2) IMHO, root causes of sequestration issue lie with POTUS who suggested concept, Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction which failed to do their job, and both parties of both houses of Congress who have failed to pass a budget.
(3) DoD, particularly SECDEF, CJCS, and Service Chiefs, IMHO has/have credibility problems because early in the process, they were all shouting [****], probably politically directed, that DoD should be a participant in deficit reduction.
(4) Lack of planning, while mandated by OMB, is inexcusable.  Secret planning and wargaming goes on in DoD all the time.  This could have been handled with a few people working in a vault with an offline computer.  That would have postured DoD to issue the statutory furlough notices to DoD employees several weeks ago.
(5) While I know some DoD employees will disagree with me from a personal cash flow perspective, I think that now that sequestration is upon the USG, if not resolved by 01 March, the best thing to do would be to shut down the government on that date for 22 days while documenting and aggressively publicizing in graphic detail the effects.  And there would be effects — people would die, air traffic system  would probably shut down, criminals would run rampant, important things would not happen, bills would go unpaid, and the list would go on and on.   That ((MIGHT)) seer into public and officeholder minds the inadvisibility of every doing this kind of thing again).

By Rowan Scarborough

The Washington Times, Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Obama administration is putting attention-getting Pentagon projects on the chopping block in a bid to pressure Congress into making a deal that avoids $46 billion in military budget cuts March 1, analysts and congressional officials say.

They use terms such as “gold watches,” “hot button” and “Washington Monumenting” to describe the cuts outlined over the past two weeks by the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard in briefings and hearings.

Analysts and Capitol Hill staffers say there are less-dramatic budget items that could be sacrificed in the first year of a decade of across-the-board spending cuts called sequestration.

But they think the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House want to pick the items that would put the most pressure on lawmakers.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Beyond the clear and present danger of Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Office of the Secretary of Defense with zero integrity and very little intelligence, a 22-day shut-down of the entire government might shock & awe in a very positive way by leading to line-item re-activation of ONLY those things the public can directly perceive to be in the public interest.  That would leave out all of secret intelligence, most of defense, all of commerce, most of agriculture, etcetera.  It's time we get the truth on the table.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Ben Gilad: Top managers’ information is invariably either biased, subjecive, filtered or late. . . . Using intelligence correctly requires a fundamental change in the way top executives make decisions.

Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger: The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].

Robert Steele: The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.

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