The opening round in an expected barrage of Defense Department personnel cuts was fired March 14 when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent a 48-page memo ordering the Pentagon to shed hundreds of civilian jobs, more than 1,000 contractors and as many as 140 generals and admirals/…/ The biggest category of projected savings is cuts to civilian and contractor jobs, projected in the memo to save $6 billion, according to analysts and experts/…/”There was a lot of cutting personnel [and] cutting contractors. Those are real savings,” Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said. “All they have to do is follow through on it and it looks from this memo that they’re going to. They have no choice.”