Doing More with Less

Doing More with less in the US Military

Terry Bufkin

English Composition 2

Professor Colvin

October 19, 2015

I joined the Air Force in June 1999, it was a time before the stress to “Answer our Nations Call,” it was a time when the military had just come out of the Cold War, the war that never actually happened. It was a time when a Master Sergeant (E-7) would walk around with a coffee cup and paper in-hand yelling for others to do the work. This activity was considered the norm, and there were multiple people who were needed to complete each task before the Master Sergeant was satisfied. In 1999, there was no such thing as “doing more, with less” as the Air Force was a service of more than 800,000 personnel strong and would ultimately pay the price for spending and numbers in strength.

Doing more with less. This has been a popular catch-phrase used in the United States Air Force for some time now, but in the last three to six years this mantra has become routine and in 2011 the term “sequestration” was announced and unknown to many just how this would affect the defense of this country. Sequestration refers, as defined by the Budget Control Act of 2011, as the mandatory reduction in federal budgetary resources of all budget accounts which have not been exempted by statute. Under the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, as amended by the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, across-the-board reductions are scheduled to take place March 1, 2013 (Epstein, 2013). Furthermore, by law, sequestration is scheduled to last 10 years and reduce costs by $1.2 trillion.

Was sequestration so bad? After witnessing the government influenced spending of U.S. tax payer’s dollars, I can tell you the Department of Defense did spend, and they spent a lot! In 2002 the U.S. military had only two distinctive types of uniforms. One uniform was green, designed for the woods, and the other uniform was brown, for the...