The first half of your post, I agree with. The second half, you’ve gone off the rails, I’m afraid. (No libertarian puts in an unfunded Medicare Part D. Privatizing the military? and by the way, there is no such thing as a ‘no-bid’ contract… go read the FAR sometime).
And yes it was pretty much a debacle.
Sorry. I’m sure McCain appreciated your vote in 2008, as will Pawlenty in 2012.
I love it when I can read a thread with such a sense of hilarity.
$300 billion is an insane amount of money for any purpose. Could America defeat its enemies with a $300 billion defense budget? H- yeah, and they’d have some left over for space-crystal cell phone improvements or some crap like that.
Who is going to pick on an America with even a $300 billion defense budget? They’d have to be stark raving barking mad to even start.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3141.htm Haliburton says there are. So do lots of other contractors.
I identified them as Ike’s.
Nor did I say he was advocating zero military.
Do you understand the military strategy and requirements that go into that budget? On what basis do you make the claim that the U.S. could defeat its enemies with a military that small? I seem to recall many on the left complaining that the U.S. didn’t have the equipment and forces necessary to defeat Iraq.
Anyway, you have to understand the difference between the U.S. forces and other force structures around the world. The primary difference is that the U.S., being isolated by oceans from the major regions of conflict and American strategic interest around the world, has to project power. This is insanely expensive. Not only do you need carriers, you need battle groups to protect the carriers. You need logistics chains and supply ships stretching across thousands of miles of ocean, and the submarines and surface warships to protect them. You need airlift capability that can move large quantities of men and material long distance on short notice.
This stuff isn’t cheap. No other countries have this capability, because no other countries have the role of world policeman like the U.S. has, or other countries have more of their own interests or threats geographically closer to them.
The minute you start cutting the budget dramatically, you start destabilizing those logistics chains, and you leave holes in the defensive strategy or take away the ability to project power in certain regions.
As an example, the U.S. has long maintained a strategy of always being able to fight a ‘two front’ war. For example, being able to enter into a major conflict in the Middle East while simultaneously being able to do the same in Asia.
There is a very good reason for this: the thinking is that if you can only fight on one front, then if that front opens up it may trigger opportunistic wars in other areas. For example, the U.S. gets involved in a conflict in the Middle East, and suddenly China realizes that its golden opportunity to take Taiwan is at hand, or Russia decides this would be a good time to invade one of its former Soviet client states to expand its sphere of influence.
If you want to have a serious discussion of the military budget, you need to understand these issues and understand what radical cuts will do to the U.S.'s overall military and diplomatic strategy. If you can’t do that, you’re just handwaving. If you’re just going to state without justification that ‘of course’ the U.S. can get by with a $300 billion budget, your opinion is worthless. Why not a $200 billion budget? Or $100 billion? Or none at all? Hell, no other country can invade the U.S. across oceans, so why not just go full pacifist and drop it all?
If you don’ t think that’s a good idea, then you need to justify the line that you DO draw. And the only way you can do that is to really spend some time learning about the U.S.'s force strategy and why it is the way it is.
There were some reports relating to food production all over the planet recently, and how both developed and developing countries exhibit a insanely high 33% percent of wasted food in all stages of production, distribution and consumption in all countries.
This is just tragic and one more indicator of how conservative politics are damaging society on a global scale.
I estimate the US military budget to operate at least at a 60% level of utter waste. Too many war corps to feed and too many scared drones that keep on voting for anyone who spews hatred against some foreign group of people, so they can justify what Dwight Eisenhower talked about.
http://www.alternet.org/story/47998 The supporting and manning 800 bases around the world, every day, year after year is a huge financial drain. We are wasting billions of dollars.
We create our own truths and create our own enemies by our worldwide tentacles reaching into every place on the globe. But there is a huge price to pay . The citizens are paying it. In order to keep their power, the military creates enemies for us to hate. Then they convince the people that they are in immediate danger .
Does anyone believe the Taliban will attack America? Yet we go to Afghanistan and Pakistan chasing them down. Our actions cause more and more enemies. It seems people resent it when a country from far away moves in and bombs and kills its people and its rudimentary infrastructure.
How would you feel if you were an Afghani who’s family was killed ? Would you accept it was just a mistake? Is it a mistake when people you don’t know come from thousands of miles away and rain down bombs on your people?
We have a factory in the middle east creating American haters. We crank out more and more everyday. It is wrong.
Ralph, do you really think that the Navy lab, is looking into the same issues that the Army lab is looking into? Do you really think that the Air Force lab is studying underwater sound propagation?
The fact that our enemies manage it, maybe? Everyone else in the world also needs strategy and various requirements, too.
Er…how would the US engage in asymmetric tactics with the US as the weaker party using cheaper weapons and more expendable soldiers? Invite them to attack us over here in the US so that our people could then go all Red Dawn on them??
-XT
Well, not invite them over here, but also not invite us over there. If they’re not attacking us here, then why do we need to fight at all?
What if they are attacking our trade or our interests? ‘Attacking us’ can mean many different things, only some of which mean bombing or attacking us here in the US.
Once you start down the path of cutting back your military to the extent that many in this thread are advocating it will be a bit late in the game to change your mind…then what? You say our enemies use such tactics, but how would we use them? Our enemies use such tactics because we are the superpower and they aren’t, and they haven’t got any choice in the matter if they don’t want to simply submit. What will our choices be if we aren’t the superpower anymore and they choose to attack our overseas interests? As I said…invite them over here so we can fight them with our citizens being used as cannon fodder? That’s how our enemies currently fight us.
It all comes down to whether or not you believe the world has fundamentally changed and that no one is going to take advantage of the military power vacuum that would happen if the US wasn’t as strong or powerful as we are or have been for the past 60 odd years.
-XT
Fundamentally, yes-they are all concerned with explosives development and control electronics. THAT is 100% duplication.
Not going to derail this, but you clearly have no idea what these labs do. It’s not all about blowing things up.
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Not going to derail this, but you clearly have no idea what these labs do. It’s not all about blowing things up.
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No sense in derailing the thread, but yeah…it shows a pretty fundamental lack of understanding of what is done at the various labs and equate that with just ‘explosives development and control electronics’.
-XT
No phobia at all. When I was young I thought it was the answer. It has proven not to be. . That is called decision making not phobia.
We spend more than every other nation combined on military. Are you really not able to understand that is huge? That that is way over the top. It is a waste of talent. A waste of resources. A waste of whatever genius is misused. It is wrong.
If you build it, you will use it. For a military man to get ahead, he needs a bigger army . He needs enemies. They wage war for prestige. They wage war for money. They wage war for promotions. It is all about power. They make up enemies and we buy it. they are experts after all.
They are business men in the business of war.
Well, I’m not with the Joint Chiefs. I’m just some guy on the internet. I try to understand.
For one, there is the notion that threats are exaggerated. This post never got any response. I have seen references to the exaggeration of the Soviet threat in various places, including the specific details about the CIA’s ‘team B’, but still it is unclear to me how believable the story is. The radio personality Randy Rhodes (sp?) vouched for the veracity of one source of this story…
In a similar vein, take a look at military production during WWII. You can see that even then the US outproduced its enemies by whopping sums. Have we faced any threat comparable to the Axis since then? I submit that we’ve engaged in nothing but wars of choice ever since (admitting the Cold War was serious and the first Persian Gulf war probably justified). But we won those wars and now seem to be at least in part on a mission to increase the size of the military budget for its own sake.
Look at this link about US military spending. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the US military budget dipped below $300 billion during the 1970’s when our biggest military challenge was allowing ourselves to be drawn into Vietnam.
We don’t face any colossal threats. During WWII we did well to more-or-less triple Germany’s output in many key categories. Scroll down in the same link and note that our military budget is almost an order of magnitude larger than either China’s or Russia’s, presumably the two biggest bogeymen out there. At $300 billion we could afford to fight both of them, at the same time.
I may not have the greatest credibility on here, so listen to Barney Frank, from here:
All right, he calls for a 25% cut. But don’t you ever wish Barney Frank were more muscular? And his reasons are similar to mine.
Do we really need as much as we have? And, cut the projected F-35 fleet in half and we save literally a trillion dollars. And still have over 1000 F-35’s!
It’s kind of like we have 10 cops watching a lone demonstrator though. Its overkill.
Do you really think other nations will see their big opportunity to conquer swaths of the globe if we lighten up on the reins a little bit, and maybe mothball an carrier group and save ourselves the trouble for awhile, just to test it out? We could always launch the ships again later.
Agreed.
But it is all out of proportion to believe we need $800 billion per year to do this. We could do it for $300 billion. And we don’t need to be as many places as we are, again it is just overkill.
Well you’d be fair not to regard me an expert; I’m not. Honestly I believe we could defend ourselves with $100 billion, and $300 billion sparked a fit of hilarity last night in comparison, though I’m not so tickled today. But you’d have to be crazy to drop it all. Standing armies are here to stay IMHO.
I hope I have at least made a good start on that. Do point out what you think I’ve got wrong or appear ignorant about.
In closing, let me quote the text of the Third Amendment:
Many politicians today are advocating cuts to Medicare, Social Security, the ACA and so on in order to defend the military budget at its current size. At some point, when you’re taking doctor visits and pensions away from grandma to pay the soldiers, aren’t you essentially forcing her to quarter soldiers? Is taking the money she needs to live on- and which she supported in the past with her taxes- a form of ‘quartering’?
We are fighting in nations that do not have organized armies. They don’t have navies. They don’t have an airforce. We rule the skies and water. We have the most advanced weaponry and spy satellites.
Yet we can not win. We can blow a country apart, and the people will resist.
People fight real hard to defend their homeland. They hate foreigners who come in from far away and try to take over.
Oh when will we ever learn?
Not at all-I have worked for both the AFRL and NWSC-and they do duplicate work all the time.