Marines told to save every round to prepare for drastic spending cuts in Washington
Daily Mail: Save those bullets soldiers. Vicious budget cuts are coming. The leader of the Marine Corps urged personnel to preserve ammunition and gasoline to brace for automatic spending cuts in Washington which are about to hit the Pentagon.
‘Save every round, every gallon of gas,’ Marine Corps Commandant James Amos told service members in a video that went live on YouTube on Friday. ‘Take every single aspect or opportunity in training to get the most bang for the buck,’ he said.
The Marines, Navy, Air Force, Army and Coast Guard are getting ready to cut billions of dollars from their budgets as the result of the ‘Sequestration’ spending cuts, which went into effect on March 1 after the White House and Congress failed to reach a deal on reducing the federal debt.
Amos wrote in a letter to all Marines earlier this month that his branch would cut $1.4 billion in 2013 and $2 billion in every following year through 2022, as the Marine Corps will be required to ‘cut into bone.’
The Pentagon announced in January that it will begin taking steps to freeze civilian hiring, delay contract awards, reduce personnel numbers and cut back on military maintenance in preparation for the looming budget cuts. As part of that effort the Marine Corps is in the process of cutting its headcount from 202,000 to 182,000 active-duty members.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters in the beginning of the year that the Defense Department is facing a spending reduction of nearly $500 billion over the next decade, not counting $110 billion in automatic cuts that went into effect this month.
‘This is no time to do business as usual,’ Amos said in his YouTube video with Micheal Barrett, 17th Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. ‘Things have changed. The landscape’s changed.”
‘I need you to be conservative in the way you do business, I need you to think about conserving our assets, and I need you to become part of the solution as it relates to sacrifice.’
Going forward the primary mission of the Marines will be to preserve their own readiness, Amos and Barrett said. That will include plans to ‘recapitalize’ and ‘modernize’ the military branch in part by taking money out of its facilities maintenance and education system.
Amos also urged Marines personnel not to direct their frustrations at Congress, which he referred to as the Corps’ ‘best friends.’ ‘The Marine Corps exists today because of the great support of Congress,’ he said. ‘So everybody is on this, everybody’s pulling together, and I want you to know we’re paying very close attention.’
No time to do “business as usual”? Tell that to Obama. His golf outing with Tiger Woods would have paid for 341 workers furloughed by his sequester. And the sequester certainly hasn’t stopped him from planning another vacation to Martha’s Vineyard.
I feel sorry for our military. Obama wants to make sure the sequester cuts “hurt as much as possible” – except for him, of course.
DCG
