good point.
but who among us would have wanted to slash atomic weapons research in the 1940s?
That is always a tough call....you want to be on the cutting edge with tech. Much of it could be dealt with a VERY open competitive bidding process, instead of just throwing cash at corps to do very remote possibilty testing, just to keep the cash flowing.
Another pet peeve I had when on active was the contractor work. We were often paying guys 5 times, no exaggeration, what a military member could perform if trained properly. A great way to address this is let active duty/reserve personnel do a kind of tradeoff, where the military will send you to a specific school, and I'm talking more about civilian ones, pay for, but you have to obligate a time in service. They already do it with the medical and dental corps and those of us who went to "A" and especially "C" school in the Navy, often had to extend our service obligation to get the school. This would really help with computer/tech guys who could keep themselves up to date in case they want to go into a civilian career after the service.
