I understand the military-industrial complex, I just don't know if senior military officer job selection is really the thing to be surprised about or get upset over.
Because three star and four star tanks are temporary, officers will retire at the end of their term to finish their career as that highest rank, rather than revert to a two star rank until they are required by law to retire. But the type of person who makes it that far isn’t going to be the type of person who wants to stay idle for long, especially if they are still feeling pretty young.
There are two, conflicting images being painted in this thread. 1. Poor generals who can't do anything other than military need these cush jobs or else they'd be out on the streets. 2. Generals are energetic and capable and would want to try something new even with a pension.
If they have enough energy to not stay idle, then certainly they don't need these arms jobs? If they're worn out and can't do anything else, then we should give them pensions enough so they don't feel forced to work for arms manufacturers.
From the article:
"One practice that introduces bias into the shaping of defense policy is the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry. The movement of retired senior officials from the Pentagon and the military services into the arms industry is a longstanding practice that raises serious questions about the appearance and reality of conflicts of interest. Mostly because employing well-connected ex-military officers can give weapons makers enormous, unwarranted influence over the process of determining the size and shape of the Pentagon budget."
This seems to answer your confusion about why they are concerned about this.
The article also seems to suggest that they aren't trying to ban former Generals from getting jobs, they would just like to regulate it better, the first two proposals seeming to be pretty important:
- Bar four-star officers from going to work for companies that receive $1 billion or more in contracts with the Pentagon annually.
- Extend “cooling off periods” before retired officials can go to work for the arms industry to four years. This would ensure that key contacts or key information that the official may have been privy to while serving would not provide an outsized advantage.
You purposefully left off the end of the sentence? You know, the part about regulation? Cause nowhere in the article does it say they are trying to stop retired generals from taking these jobs, just that they would like to regulate it to prevent conflicts of interest. I get the feeling that maybe you haven’t read the article yet?
So is the issue that they'd have to work at McDonald's or that they don't want to return to their pre elevation job? Or that they want a cushy retirement job somewhere? Something else? Be clear if you're trying to make a point please.
> I understand the military-industrial complex, I just don't know if senior military officer job selection is really the thing to get upset over.
Why not? The article provides a few cases of this situation leading to wasteful spending. Limiting this revolving door can eliminate waste.
> Where do you expect US generals to get jobs?
I'd pay them not to work. Same for retired Congress members. You get 100% of your salary for four years to help close the revolving door. That's the deal you make for taking the job. This can be enforced on military officers, but would probably be deemed unconstitutional for Congress.
I’m sure there are plenty of places that would be happy to have people with experience running life or death operations involving the most complex infrastructure imaginable.
The fact is that defense contractors are not employing them for their transferable skills. They just want a direct line into the pentagons (i.e. the public’s) pockets.
I’m more surprised that 80%+ of generals feel they need to work after their discharge.
The presumption that employing former generals impacts the military spending budgets is, if true, a failure of the legislature and the budgetary councils, not these former government employees moving onto private sector jobs.
The type person who makes O-9 or O-10 is one that just needs to always be working. It's no different than C-suite executives in any other field: they go insane if they're not doing *something*, so why not do something they've spent 30+ years being successful at.
This is like complaining that someone like Vint Cerf or Guido von Rossum isn't quitting technology to go to law school. When you have 30-40 years of experience up to literally the executive or C-suite level in a field, your best bet in your 50s is to stay in that field. And for General Officers or Flag Officers, that field is the defense sector.
Sure, it's always needed to have ethics safeguards when people involved in contracting switch jobs, but domain expertise is a thing that's valued. And as much as it's an uncomfortable truth for some people on the internet, working in defense is not a dishonorable career. And while corruption in the so-called "military-industrial complex" exists, based on my 20 years in uniform, I'm not sure it's worse than in other sectors of the economy.
> And while corruption in the so-called "military-industrial complex" exists, based on my 20 years in uniform, I'm not sure it's worse than in other sectors of the economy.
Your response to the corruption is whataboutism? Should we aim to end corruption regardless of what happens in other sectors?
a more appropriate interpretation (according to the site guidelines) is that the poster was implying corruption in the us economy is very low and that military corruption, being no worse, is also very low.
aiming to eliminate corruptoin is a bit pie in the sky.
Exactly this. If the Fat Leonard fiasco had been a "dog bites man" story, it wouldn't have been such a scandal.
Again, looking back on a 20-year active and reserve career in uniform, my personal opinion is that a lot of the waste and inefficiency in DOD is precisely because of all the ethics rules. Not that I don't approve of ethics rules, but there are times it seems the hoops you have to jump through to spend government money are based on the assumption that A) everything has to be above board and B) all contractors involved are inherently a bunch of flim-flam artists who will fleece the government given half a chance.
And this is precisely why the Pentagon bureaucracy is so infamous, and why companies want to hire retired Generals and Admirals to help them navigate it.
Of course we should. But I'm not convinced barring four-stars from going to work with Raytheon or Lockheed Martin is the way to do it. First off, defense contracting is run through the services, not the combatant commands, so there's 11 four-star officers off the bat who aren't making contracting decisions compared to six who are. Remember, military services man, train, and equip the Joint Force. Combatant Commanders employ the Joint Force. The service heads have no command authority in the field. They are merely force providers to the Combatant Commanders.
What's more, funding allocations to the services start with what's called the Defense Planning Guidance, which is a document issued by the Office of the (civilian) Secretary of Defense. This is then broken down into Service Program Guidance about where each military service spends its money. Services then come up with a Program Objective Memorandum outlining the budget they need, which then goes to the Joint Staff, because the Joint Staff's job is refereeing interservice food fights. This then goes to the (civilian) Presidential administration, who presents a budget to Congress, who approves it.
So there are many cooks in this budgetary kitchen, and if Congress doesn't like the military Congress funded and approved for the President to use, then perhaps Congress can look itself in the face and ask itself why it's not fulfilling its duties under Article I of the United States Constitution, instead of trying to pass the buck onto the President's subordinate officers, when it's ultimately Congress who controls the purse strings.
Yes, but ending the ability of government employees who are forced to retire to seek employment in their field of expertise is not a good solution to corruption.
The Pentagon makes tens of trillions of dollars of accounting adjustments each year because its internal financial controls are basically non existent.
If the Pentagon was a publicly traded company, Matt Levine would be writing about it as an exemplar of fraud every week and its shareholders would be suing.
You're underplaying the corruption by an order of magnitude at least.
>The fiscal 2019 audit examined more than $2.9 trillion in assets and $2.8 trillion in liabilities, the Pentagon said. The process involved about 1,400 auditors conducting 600 site visits, at a cost of nearly $1 billion.
Sounds like they can't keep track of all the stuff they supposedly own (ie. "assets"). That's slightly different than its yearly budget simply disappearing. Even if this year they tracked down where every cent went, they'd still fail the audit, because they can't account for the stuff they purchased years ago.
It still shows up in inflation and interest rates. It’s the same with the national debt. The difference between 24 trillion and 25 trillion is basically just inflation and interest rates.
Don't you think we should hold any economic activity that impacts those working in the service of the public interest/their elected representatives to a higher standard than "other sectors of the economy"?
Public servants/members of the military not only pledge to avoid conflicts of interest, but the appearance of them as well. Shouldn't we hold economic activity that services those interests to that same standard?
>Public servants/members of the military not only pledge to avoid conflicts of interest, but the appearance of them as well. Shouldn't we hold economic activity that services those interests to that same standard?
But are we willing to pay for it? Government jobs already pay pretty poorly compared to the private sector. Slapping the equivalent of a non-compete onto them isn't going to make them more appealing. You might have gotten rid of all the corruption, but you also ensured that the government will be staffed by monkeys.
Military members, government employees, and defense contractors all receive their money from the same source - the defense budget. The government is already paying people super high salaries, just indirectly through a layer of contracts. So its not about the money.
Even then an O-9/O-10 gets $17,675.10 a month[0] in base pay and $3,963 a month[1] in *tax exempt*[2] housing allowance for the DC metro area. That's $259,657.20 a year in salary. While maybe not high by C-suite or Silicone Valley standards, that ain't bad at all.
What does O-9/O-10 correspond to in terms of rank, and what does that correspond to in the private sector? If that's equivalent to VP/c-suite at a large company, then $260k is pretty low.
O-9s are Vice Admirals/Lieutenant Generals. Three-star officers. O-10s are full Admirals and Generals. Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, service heads, combatant commanders.
O-10s are almost all direct reports of the Secretary of Defense and skip-level reports of the President. Many O-9s are direct reports of an O-10 and skip-level reports of the Secretary of Defense.
3 and 4 star generals/admirals. These would be C-suite executives and LoB level VPs in the private sector. Yes, compared to their private sector counter-parts $260,000 is low, and they also can only get compensated in pay; there is no equity , stock, or bonus options.
It's not so obvious I think. Since you mentioned one extreme, lets look at both: staffed by monkeys, or staffed by psychopaths who might prioritize personal gain over American interests. That's not a recipe for a clear winner if we're eliminating nuance.
We're not talking about "a country without a military." We're talking about the american war machine, possibly the greatest engine of destruction and misery the world has ever known.
If the US can't exist without the atrocities it has been using its military to commit for the last century then sure, it should not exist. I suspect there are other paths, however.
US military is the best thing that have happened to the world, and is one of the main reasons for the decades of general peace and prosperity that happened since WW2 globally.
I'm talking specific to the US military and its uses and transgressions, not condemning everyone who has ever fought a war in history. Nothing in "basic human nature" made us do agent orange or abu ghraib. We chose this course and we must unchoose it.
What domain expertise? They’re experts at navigating politics at that level more than anything else. The vast majority of these people are taking board seats. They don’t even work for the companies full time, let alone apply any of their expertise to AI companies and experimental drone platforms.
Are you telling me that people who worked their way up from entry-level to executive and C-suite positions don't have any domain expertise beyond "playing politics?"
Every general and flag officer started out as a junior officer or junior enlisted servicemember. There is literally no other way to get there. There are no lateral hires into the military; it's "up or out."
Sure but it has likely been decades since they practiced their speciality. If lockheed were hiring these generals for their technical expertise why put them on the board of directors?
I’m saying it’d be a lot more plausible an argument if they actually went into roles where some other domain expertise applied. Board members is not one of those roles, especially when they’re joining the boards of companies working on cutting edge tech like AI and drone platforms.
Most of these generals also went through the military academies, not ROTC or some other pipeline. They had to convince a member of Congress to recommend them, so yes navigating politics plays heavily into their career from day one.
Plenty of other career officers go into consulting or actual leadership roles but the generals named in the article are bought off with these board seats to use their influence over military decision makers, not some other nebulous expertise.
War is too serious a matter to be left to the generals.
An absolutely oversized military industrial complex is indeed problematic if a country wants to be a full democracy.
It's not the only reason obviously, but according to the economist democracy index, the USA ranks as "flawed democracy", #30 in the world, which is better than Slovenia and Botsnawa but far from the countries from Scandinavia.
The main reason The Economist ranked down the US was the electral college, and gerrymandering. Not it's military industrial complex or revolving door between politics and industry.
> War is too serious a matter to be left to the generals. An absolutely oversized military industrial complex is indeed problematic if a country wants to be a full democracy.
I think that the US armed forces have a far wider set of responsibilities than "war". For example, they act as a social protection service for its members, and weapons program are managed as part of economic policies as job guarantee programmes.
Then there are research programs who started out as military projects which ended up benefitting the whole mankind, such as the internet or GPS.
This takes place in a country whose society has been almost rabidly opposed to any policy remotely associated with socialism. It's almost a cheat code of sorts.
In pragmatic terms, criticising the US armed forces just because "war" seems ignorant and foolish.
The US military, in a sense then, is actually a fully self-contained centrally managed economy and state. Funny how 'communism' can be both the ultimate evil AND the structural model needed for efficient running of such a large organization like the military.
> Funny how 'communism' can be both the ultimate evil (...)
I don't think you fully understand the issue you're trying to comment on. Not only is conflating a military organization with communism beyond wrong, but you're also completely oblivious to very basic aspects of human nature that are key to living fulfilling lives such as human rights and individual freedom.
I'm not oblivious to any of those things. But the parallels still seem to exist; both communism and the military are centrally managed, rigidly hierarchical, demand loyalty, punish dissent, and both place the goals of the organization above the freedom of the individual.
I don't think so. The definition of communism is not a organization with a hierarchical structure. You even fail to touch the central traits of communism. You're simply trying to forcefully conflate two separate concepts while ignoring it's primary traits.
Communism as applied in practice, specifically the former soviet union, very much had a hierarchy.
The primary traits of interest I listed in the previous comment. Are they exactly the same? of course not. But that doesn't mean they can't share similarities.
. . . are you seriously responding to a post about actual DOD contracting by referencing a fictional Hollywood movie, a satirical fictional Hollywood movie, an HBO series, and a Tom Clancy character?
That's not how it works. You don't get to pull out of your ass that a random career is dishonorable and pretend that it's everyone else's responsibility to fix your unsubstantiated accusation.
Either you have a valid reason to argue that a career is dishonorable, or you should just stay quiet.
> That's not how it works. You don't get to pull out of your ass that a random career is dishonorable and pretend that it's everyone else's responsibility to fix your unsubstantiated accusation.
You find it strange to consider murderers and torturers to be dishonorable?
> And while corruption in the so-called "military-industrial complex" exists, based on my 20 years in uniform, I'm not sure it's worse than in other sectors of the economy.
The issue with defense contracting is not corruption, but the fact that it can feel like a trap for a lot of transitioning vets. For every general that retires there’s 1000+ mid level officers and enlisted not knowing what else to do with themselves. And after 6-20 years in service joining a defense company because they were under equipped to and unprepared to transition from military duty to a fully civilian position.
Generals and Admirals in the know have very current knowledge about capability gaps, and how to better serve the customer. Given that they already have a 1 year cooling off period for any contract they directly oversaw (most weapons programs are overseen by O6 & O5s, or junior SES).
We're in this very sensitive time where you want senior Warfighters and planners are vitally needed for a massive modernization campaign as we shift US Defense away from counter-terrorism and towards peer nation-states. US Defense was lulled during Iraq and Afghanistan, thinking counter-insurgency is what we'll be fighting forever.
The military way of thinking and planning battle campaigns, and knowledge of Order of Battle, both our own, but also of our enemies - that is perishable knowledge in these senior officer's heads.
Additionally I would like to bring up one other thing - although troops matter a great deal, and so does training, much of combat comes down to weapons systems.
Weapon Systems - Better, faster, cheaper, more accurate, more lethal, more mass-producable, less resource intensive, more logistically mobile - is what wins wars.
Think Tanks can be a good place for a flag officer too, but generally they don't have as much money.
I think I'd actually prefer to see the generals and admirals getting new gigs with the smaller side of defense industry - there are tons of medium and small sized companies that could use their help.
> there are tons of medium and small sized companies that could use their help
Yeah, but how many can pay something equivalent to the big boys?
A friend's father retired from the Navy as a former boomer captain and went into industry as an inspector for power plants, working for one of the large insurers. Not a job that's going away, not a small company that might or might not make it. Just steady employment for the next 15 years or so (which, given how long ago it was, he's well beyond) until he wants to retire for good.
By this same logic we should ban anyone working for the government from taking on a private sector job in the same field, and vice versa. Silicon Valley executives shouldn't be allowed to take a role in the government's technology group 18F?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadWhere do you expect US generals to get jobs?
Foreign militaries?
McDonald's?
Blackwater?
I understand the military-industrial complex, I just don't know if senior military officer job selection is really the thing to be surprised about or get upset over.
Point is - it’s common for people in public service to get gigs in private sector after their stint
If they have enough energy to not stay idle, then certainly they don't need these arms jobs? If they're worn out and can't do anything else, then we should give them pensions enough so they don't feel forced to work for arms manufacturers.
This seems to answer your confusion about why they are concerned about this.
The article also seems to suggest that they aren't trying to ban former Generals from getting jobs, they would just like to regulate it better, the first two proposals seeming to be pretty important:
- Bar four-star officers from going to work for companies that receive $1 billion or more in contracts with the Pentagon annually.
- Extend “cooling off periods” before retired officials can go to work for the arms industry to four years. This would ensure that key contacts or key information that the official may have been privy to while serving would not provide an outsized advantage.
McDonald's?
> These are retirees, they have pensions
Why not? The article provides a few cases of this situation leading to wasteful spending. Limiting this revolving door can eliminate waste.
> Where do you expect US generals to get jobs?
I'd pay them not to work. Same for retired Congress members. You get 100% of your salary for four years to help close the revolving door. That's the deal you make for taking the job. This can be enforced on military officers, but would probably be deemed unconstitutional for Congress.
The fact is that defense contractors are not employing them for their transferable skills. They just want a direct line into the pentagons (i.e. the public’s) pockets.
The presumption that employing former generals impacts the military spending budgets is, if true, a failure of the legislature and the budgetary councils, not these former government employees moving onto private sector jobs.
Would you be surprised if I told you that tech CEOs don't base their employment on financial need?
Sure, it's always needed to have ethics safeguards when people involved in contracting switch jobs, but domain expertise is a thing that's valued. And as much as it's an uncomfortable truth for some people on the internet, working in defense is not a dishonorable career. And while corruption in the so-called "military-industrial complex" exists, based on my 20 years in uniform, I'm not sure it's worse than in other sectors of the economy.
Your response to the corruption is whataboutism? Should we aim to end corruption regardless of what happens in other sectors?
aiming to eliminate corruptoin is a bit pie in the sky.
Again, looking back on a 20-year active and reserve career in uniform, my personal opinion is that a lot of the waste and inefficiency in DOD is precisely because of all the ethics rules. Not that I don't approve of ethics rules, but there are times it seems the hoops you have to jump through to spend government money are based on the assumption that A) everything has to be above board and B) all contractors involved are inherently a bunch of flim-flam artists who will fleece the government given half a chance.
And this is precisely why the Pentagon bureaucracy is so infamous, and why companies want to hire retired Generals and Admirals to help them navigate it.
What's more, funding allocations to the services start with what's called the Defense Planning Guidance, which is a document issued by the Office of the (civilian) Secretary of Defense. This is then broken down into Service Program Guidance about where each military service spends its money. Services then come up with a Program Objective Memorandum outlining the budget they need, which then goes to the Joint Staff, because the Joint Staff's job is refereeing interservice food fights. This then goes to the (civilian) Presidential administration, who presents a budget to Congress, who approves it.
So there are many cooks in this budgetary kitchen, and if Congress doesn't like the military Congress funded and approved for the President to use, then perhaps Congress can look itself in the face and ask itself why it's not fulfilling its duties under Article I of the United States Constitution, instead of trying to pass the buck onto the President's subordinate officers, when it's ultimately Congress who controls the purse strings.
I keep saying "Congress" for a reason . . .
The Pentagon cannot pass an audit of its budget to save its life, it's the status quo: https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2019/11/20/Pentagon-Fails-Aud....
The Pentagon makes tens of trillions of dollars of accounting adjustments each year because its internal financial controls are basically non existent.
If the Pentagon was a publicly traded company, Matt Levine would be writing about it as an exemplar of fraud every week and its shareholders would be suing.
You're underplaying the corruption by an order of magnitude at least.
That's not what the link claims though.
>The fiscal 2019 audit examined more than $2.9 trillion in assets and $2.8 trillion in liabilities, the Pentagon said. The process involved about 1,400 auditors conducting 600 site visits, at a cost of nearly $1 billion.
Sounds like they can't keep track of all the stuff they supposedly own (ie. "assets"). That's slightly different than its yearly budget simply disappearing. Even if this year they tracked down where every cent went, they'd still fail the audit, because they can't account for the stuff they purchased years ago.
Public servants/members of the military not only pledge to avoid conflicts of interest, but the appearance of them as well. Shouldn't we hold economic activity that services those interests to that same standard?
But are we willing to pay for it? Government jobs already pay pretty poorly compared to the private sector. Slapping the equivalent of a non-compete onto them isn't going to make them more appealing. You might have gotten rid of all the corruption, but you also ensured that the government will be staffed by monkeys.
Even then an O-9/O-10 gets $17,675.10 a month[0] in base pay and $3,963 a month[1] in *tax exempt*[2] housing allowance for the DC metro area. That's $259,657.20 a year in salary. While maybe not high by C-suite or Silicone Valley standards, that ain't bad at all.
0. https://militarypay.defense.gov/Portals/3/Documents/2023%20B... 1. https://veteran.com/bah-rates-state/district-of-columbia-dc/ 2. https://militarypay.defense.gov/Pay/Tax-Information/Exempt/
O-10s are almost all direct reports of the Secretary of Defense and skip-level reports of the President. Many O-9s are direct reports of an O-10 and skip-level reports of the Secretary of Defense.
If the US can't exist without the atrocities it has been using its military to commit for the last century then sure, it should not exist. I suspect there are other paths, however.
Be thankful that you are not in charge of a country where hard decisions get made, and each decision costs lives no matter what you do.
I would not trust you.
They’re there for connections.
Every general and flag officer started out as a junior officer or junior enlisted servicemember. There is literally no other way to get there. There are no lateral hires into the military; it's "up or out."
Most of these generals also went through the military academies, not ROTC or some other pipeline. They had to convince a member of Congress to recommend them, so yes navigating politics plays heavily into their career from day one.
Plenty of other career officers go into consulting or actual leadership roles but the generals named in the article are bought off with these board seats to use their influence over military decision makers, not some other nebulous expertise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I think that the US armed forces have a far wider set of responsibilities than "war". For example, they act as a social protection service for its members, and weapons program are managed as part of economic policies as job guarantee programmes.
Then there are research programs who started out as military projects which ended up benefitting the whole mankind, such as the internet or GPS.
This takes place in a country whose society has been almost rabidly opposed to any policy remotely associated with socialism. It's almost a cheat code of sorts.
In pragmatic terms, criticising the US armed forces just because "war" seems ignorant and foolish.
I don't think you fully understand the issue you're trying to comment on. Not only is conflating a military organization with communism beyond wrong, but you're also completely oblivious to very basic aspects of human nature that are key to living fulfilling lives such as human rights and individual freedom.
I don't think so. The definition of communism is not a organization with a hierarchical structure. You even fail to touch the central traits of communism. You're simply trying to forcefully conflate two separate concepts while ignoring it's primary traits.
In short, gibberish.
The primary traits of interest I listed in the previous comment. Are they exactly the same? of course not. But that doesn't mean they can't share similarities.
I'm not convinced you realize that the definition of communism is not "a hierarchical organization".
I don't see the point of continuing this discussion. Even your basic assumptions are fundamentally wrong.
Otherwise sometimes partisan, but topical; Ctrl-F "lobby"; 2 year waiting period for lawmakers; "End Washington Corruption": https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/end-washington-corruption
Lord of War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_War
Tropic Thunder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder
Barry on HBO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_(TV_series)
Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(TV_series)
That's not how it works. You don't get to pull out of your ass that a random career is dishonorable and pretend that it's everyone else's responsibility to fix your unsubstantiated accusation.
Either you have a valid reason to argue that a career is dishonorable, or you should just stay quiet.
You find it strange to consider murderers and torturers to be dishonorable?
The issue with defense contracting is not corruption, but the fact that it can feel like a trap for a lot of transitioning vets. For every general that retires there’s 1000+ mid level officers and enlisted not knowing what else to do with themselves. And after 6-20 years in service joining a defense company because they were under equipped to and unprepared to transition from military duty to a fully civilian position.
Generals and Admirals in the know have very current knowledge about capability gaps, and how to better serve the customer. Given that they already have a 1 year cooling off period for any contract they directly oversaw (most weapons programs are overseen by O6 & O5s, or junior SES).
We're in this very sensitive time where you want senior Warfighters and planners are vitally needed for a massive modernization campaign as we shift US Defense away from counter-terrorism and towards peer nation-states. US Defense was lulled during Iraq and Afghanistan, thinking counter-insurgency is what we'll be fighting forever.
The military way of thinking and planning battle campaigns, and knowledge of Order of Battle, both our own, but also of our enemies - that is perishable knowledge in these senior officer's heads.
Additionally I would like to bring up one other thing - although troops matter a great deal, and so does training, much of combat comes down to weapons systems.
Weapon Systems - Better, faster, cheaper, more accurate, more lethal, more mass-producable, less resource intensive, more logistically mobile - is what wins wars.
I think I'd actually prefer to see the generals and admirals getting new gigs with the smaller side of defense industry - there are tons of medium and small sized companies that could use their help.
Yeah, but how many can pay something equivalent to the big boys?
A friend's father retired from the Navy as a former boomer captain and went into industry as an inspector for power plants, working for one of the large insurers. Not a job that's going away, not a small company that might or might not make it. Just steady employment for the next 15 years or so (which, given how long ago it was, he's well beyond) until he wants to retire for good.