Saving on Defense

If the Defense Dept. wants more funds for weapons, it should look within itself, or so says this editorial from the Washington Times:


Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld estimates that the Pentagon could save as much as 5 percent of its annual budget by improving business operations. Why hasn't it been done? The answer is complicated. It owes partly to bureaucratic inertia, partly to congressional inaction and partly to the Bush administration's inability to make real progress streamlining national-security spending.

I've always advocated that the Defense budget could be halved, mainly by building less high-tech weapons and dumping Cold War bases. Change is coming, only slow and painfully.