Local musician Jim Duff has the blues

Comment by drzrocks: Wednesday, July 14

I never heard anything impressive on his site at all....read more...

Humane Society comes under fire in local farming magazine

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Patti Strand, of the National Animal Interest Alliance, author of "The Hijacking of the Humane Movem...read more...

Humane Society comes under fire in local farming magazine

Comment by HillaryatHSUS: Wednesday, July 7

I work at the HSUS, and I’ve also worked at several animal shelters. Shelters do great work – ad...read more...

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Looking at the commonwealth’s budget process for the last decade recalls the old Department of Defense (DoD) budgets...just add 10-percent to the previous year’s budget and resubmit. The DoD got away with this for decades; there was no significant budget scrutiny from the Kennedy administration through the Reagan years, but tectonic international events and spiraling budget deficits gave birth to a painful process that fundamentally changed almost half a century of business as usual in the DoD, and that is what is needed if Kentucky is to ever pull out of its fiscal nosedive.

The first, and arguably the most traumatic, process was the establishment of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) committee in 1988 to look at closing excess or redundant military installations. Military bases bring millions of dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian jobs to an area and politicians fought tooth and nail to protect their constituents while arguing ineffectively how the bases in their districts were critical for national defense. But, despite what congressmen think, military bases aren’t built to keep their constituents employed, and when BRAC revealed there were three Air Force bases and a Marine Corps Air Station within 50 miles of each other near Los Angeles, three of the facilities were closed. To date, more than 350 installations have been closed.

With the demise of the global Soviet empire, the Clinton administration correctly questioned just what war the DoD was preparing for. Worse than the fiscal waste incurred while the DoD soldiered on purchasing weapons systems to fight the now dead threat of communism was an inability in several of the services to adapt to nimbler, nontraditional threats which lead to the Bottom-up-Review (BUR).

It boiled down to two simple questions: What threats are we preparing for, and what do we need to win?

Regardless of the obvious fiscal benefits of this drill, it was a great exercise for military. In light of the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the face of surely declining budgets, smaller forces and fewer bases, the DoD and each service were forced to look at their contribution to the newly defined mission.

Again, the process was widely criticized by politicians because, well, those old weapon systems had to be built somewhere, but the services truly benefited from the enforced self-assessment the process required. The Navy and the Marine Corps were generally on track, but the Air Force and the Army were slow to realize that the days of waiting for Red Horde to pour through the Fulda Gap were over, and it was an agonizing few years for those services as they moved from static to expeditionary mindsets.

When the mission question was sorted out, the services were told to use zero-based budgeting (ZBB). That is, forget what you got last year. Starting with zero, build a budget that allows you to accomplish the mission and sustain the force.

Again, getting started was painful, but ZBB is really a zesty enterprise when you throw yourself into it, and quite liberating. You start with a blank sheet of paper, look at what it is you do, what you need to do it and how much it costs. You throw out the organization charts and the huge inventories of properties and equipment. You ignore the carping of competing, redundant bureaucracies with multiple levels of management insisting how ‘critical’ they are, and you unemotionally hack through the complex levels of obstacles and entrenchments built over the years by those protecting their turf until you get down to really hard questions. How much do you need to do your job?

Some of the Old Guard in the DoD resisted, and to President Clinton’s credit, they got the axe. Like the BRAC process and the Bottom up Review, the zero based budget took a lot of work, but a veritable mountain of waste was uncovered. At the San Francisco Navy Yards the base management began shutting off utilities to what were thought to be unused facilities and dozens of contractors, who had enjoyed decades of free workspace, power, water and phones, angrily demanded to know what was going on. Oh, to have a video camera at times like that.

So what does this all have to do with our old Kentucky home? Well, 20 years after BRAC, BUR and ZBB our armed forces are leaner, faster adapting and better prepared for war than ever in our nation’s history. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate were forced out and replaced by younger, hungrier leaders who were happy to see the dead wood thrown into the fire. Since the analysis and subsequent reductions were done in the light of day, politicians who fought to retain turf and influence while wrapping themselves in the flag were revealed for what they were: pandering, self-serving hacks.

Gambling will not fix Kentucky’s budget problems. The governor needs to annunciate what the critical functions of government are and start at zero. The number of cabinets, agencies and subordinate organizations need to be cut to the bare minimum, and the number of desk sitters in Frankfort and across the commonwealth need to be cut; no agency should be spared. The excess property and equipment they leave behind can go on EBay, and before a single dollar goes into the next budget, lawmakers need to be ready to answer the question: What does this do to help the people of Kentucky.

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