Sam Stone - you have thoroughly confused me. Explain to me how aggregate dollars appropriated for a particular federal program is precisely co-equal with the relative “strength” or “weakness” of either the aformentioned program, or its adherents?
Or, in smaller words, how does spending more money on defense/intelligence equal “strong” and spending less equal “weak”? The causality escapes me, and I’ll tell you why:
The “Sergeant York” radar-controlled autonomous mobile antiaircraft vehicle - it did not work.
The “Crusader” mobile artillery platform - didn’t work either.
“Star Wars” ICBM defense system - works almost 50% of the time, so Dubya has made it a funding priority. If successfully deployed, we will therefore be (in the immortal words of Billy Crystal in Princess Bride) only mostly dead.
$400 hammers and $1500 toilet seats. Stories about these costly items are probably apocryphal, but the wonderful world of military procurement has a well-deserved reputation for profligacy and idiocy.
Yet somehow these delightful Reagan-era “investments” solidified The Great Communicator as Mr. Strong on Defense Guy, despite the appalling lack of mission integrity endemic to the Lebanon disaster and the dubious distinction of “liberating” Grenada, which are arguably more concrete measures of relative strength or weakness in military policy.
To even further illustrate my point, let’s turn to the wonderful world of the capitalist marketplace. I would consider it axiomatic to declare that the ability of an organization to perform more tasks with a higher incidence of success but for lower costs than competitors, is the clear hallmark of efficiency. In a business sense, efficiency = profit, and profit = strength.
But in Sam’s world, it would seem that a CEO who spends less of his budget to accomplish a specific goal must clearly be weak when it comes to whatever that goal is.
While I sympathize with your desire to impugn the reputation of an individual whose point of view you dislike, GD is not the appropriate forum. Please do us the courtesy of sticking to logical arguments. If you have do not have some other method besides raw dollar outlays to assess relative strength or weakness on matters of public policy, I suggest you recuse yourself from the debate as there is clearly no foundation in reality for such an argument.
(as an aside, I would just like to point out that Don Rumsfeld’s smashing success on the Iraqi battlefield with a “lean, mean” U.S. military was accomplished with equipment, training, and personnel deriving from the Clinton administration. I daresay even Rummy is thanking his lucky stars for Slick Willy’s careful investment in the American fighting soldier and his hi-tech killing machines)
