Indeed. There's undoubtably fat to cut all across the board but anybody who decries government spending and waste and doesn't include the DOD as part of that is a hypocrite at best.
I didn't downvote you, but tell how you would like to downsize the military's mission 95%. No overseas bases? No Coast Guard? No R&D? Just looking at a big number and saying "cut it" is easy, saying what to cut is hard.
95% is overly aggressive, but that doesn't mean there's opportunities to trim fat.
Addressing the DOD's accounting failures is a first step -- famously admitted to by Don Rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld says, “Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building. Because it's stored on dozens of different technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.”
There's zero incentive to cut waste -- in fact the opposite. At the end of the fiscal year it's SOP to spend every last penny in the budget on anything they can, just to ensure their budget isn't cut.
Afghanistan and Iraq cost the US ~$6T and we got nothing to show for it.
There's got to be a reasonable center between "God bless the US Military" and "Shut it all down".
