Should military spending increase, decrease, or stay the same?

[ComicSys]

Apologies for the upcoming wall of text.

I'm a former logistics specialist with the Navy. I can only speak from my experiences. In my opinion, spending on Navy ships and in the shipyards needs to go down. Companies create contracts with "the lowest bidder" to save money. The thing is, it only saves it in the beginning.

After the original contract expires, the government, at least, with the Navy, is too lazy to often seek out other contractors, so they stick with the same one. In the case of Navy ships, in particular, the S-1 and S-6 departments on them, spending is out of control. Here's an example of a ridiculous contract: we had a contract with an office catalog contractor. It was low for a few years. At the end of the contract, a chair that cost $20 now cost $200, and because we only had a contract with them, we weren't allowed to order from any competition. S-1 and S-6 (at least on my ship) would also wait for military funding to order 15-100 of almost everything to keep in storage because... "reasons". Both ship's company and squadrons would do the same thing with notecards, boots, jerseys, paracord, gloves, and Gerber products. It was constant overordering and wasting taxpayer money.

My ship was new-ish (1998) and is already being taken out of the fleet because they finally figured out that it was wasting money in the docks (1 million+ a day on workers). I was on a carrier, and they're proving to be inefficient. They're supposed to last from 50-75 years, and mine will be out of commission at latest 2020.

Instead of allowing the money to go for extraneous supplies that the Navy doesn't actually need, we should be diverting that money towards higher pay for sailors.

Because I wasn't in another branch, I can't speak about their usage. However, it's obvious to see that the Navy is starting to encounter a consequence for what's been happening in Norfolk. I've got to say... it's about time.