A plan to destroy the DOD in progress, for years

Expect the downward trends to continue:

Similar perverse thoughtlessness pervades even more important issues, such as the readiness of our forces to fight and otherwise perform their missions. In 2010, the Navy, to its credit, completed a blistering review of the readiness of its surface fleet. The Balisle Report found ship maintenance went underfunded and had been declining for years; fewer than one-half of deployed combat aircraft are fully mission capable at any given time; training throughout the surface fleet has been inadequate; and ships are routinely undermanned and cannibalized for parts to keep others running.

The fleet was in substantially worse shape than it was in 2001. GAO found several of the same problems. Even one of the Navy's biggest stalwarts, Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA), reported in 2012, "The Readiness trends for full mission capability rates suggest less than satisfactory performance." And yet, that new CSBA report mentioned above came to the remarkable conclusion that readiness is so high throughout the military services that money can be shifted from those spending accounts "with little risk" to free up cash to buy hardware. (Whether that hardware should actually be realistically tested before it is bought is an idea that seems to have escaped the report authors' purview.) Nonetheless, the CSBA report is sure to be taken most seriously in Washington; it gives decision-makers an easy out for keeping hardware programs -- and their multiple constituencies in the Pentagon, industry, Congress, the press, and think tanks -- fat and happy.