If Romney is elected, he says he would reverse the Obama administration’s plan to decrease the size of the US Army by 80,000 and the size of the US Marine Corps by 20,000.
At the same time, Romney has stressed that since the year 2000, the Pentagon’s civilian staff has grown by 20 percent. “The Department’s bureaucracy is bloated to the point of dysfunction and is ripe for being pared,” he says in an issues statement.
That said, he notes that during the same time period, “our active duty fighting force grew by only 3.4 percent. That imbalance needs to be rectified.”
The Obama administration has stressed that its decision to reduce the size of the US military by 100,000 troops is an effort to save defense dollars, since personnel costs – including health care and other benefits – are the fastest-growing expenses for the Pentagon.
Health-care costs for troops have soared from $19 billion in 2001 to $52.5 billion 10 years later.
Whether these cuts in military strength are enacted will in turn affect the population of US veterans, analysts say – and the resources that will remain for their care.
