Defense Secretary Mattis is worried about the military budget. No, he’s not worried that spending a total of more than a trillion dollars a year on the military might bankrupt the country and thus make us more vulnerable to outside forces with ill intent. He’s worried that our very survival depends on even more money for the military and no more yearly budget “fights” on funding the military. Even though Congress gave him even more than he requested, he’s worried. But what about the policy? What is the proper US role in the world a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War? Some “realists” are longing for the days of the Cold War, where America ruled the roost. Today in the Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Puny??!!!
Talk straight, with military members we do NOT APPRECIATE their killing business. Tell your neighbor, your son, your friends. None of the wars since at least ww2 have been self defense and we’ve killed millions upon millions of people who never attacked America. 2 million in Korea, over 2 million in Vietnam/cambodia and now well over a million in the persian gulf. Hmm maybe I should do a graphic if you laid their bodies from end to end, and the average height was around 5 feet since there are a lot of malnourished as well as children, it would be 6 million x 5 feet = 30 million feet, that would be 5,600 miles long.. hmm maybe a stack would be more impressive. If the average dead body is 8 inches high and you stack up 6 million dead bodies, that’s 4 million feet high. THat’s a stack of dead bodies 750 miles high in the air.
Good try, Todd, but the vast majority of the ones who Need To Learn That, can’t understand multiple syllable words and won’t even try. They only speak English and that badly. They’re also unable to understand Math. I tutored on a voluntary basis GED applicants, and those people were a lot more ready and eager to learn than the ‘hip hip hooray for the usa!’ crowd, although the groups might have overlapped a bit. I know that to become an officer in the air farts (and the other services) one has to have at least a Bachelors’ degree or a very rich family member who can bribe the Pentagon. There’s not very many of that group but it’s still Way Too Much. So what’s their excuse?
And one of my Senators, Democrat Jon Tester, just sent out an email to his constituents talking about how we have to “do something” about preventing suicide by military veterans. You want to prevent suicide among veterans, Jon? Try ending these f*cking wars then!
Mattis is correct. The empire cannot survive on a puny budget.
The US military budget is a mechanism for high-salary welfare to American engineers. When I worked at Raytheon, it was common for ten guys to stand around and watch one guy program the computer. The “work” was a joke. It was mostly idle chatter, meetings, and irrelevant paperwork. This is a common experience among the military-industrial engineers I’ve known, wherever they work. The problem stems from how military contracts are structured. Private contracting companies get paid by the number of people on the project, not by the job done. So they hire as many people (“warm bodies”) as they can get away with, to maximize profits. The upshot? It probably costs the US about ten times as much as, say, Russia, to produce the same military technology. That’s why our budget is so big and our military so lame. Mattis needs a better understanding of cause and effect here. Contracts need to be structured differently, so the MOST gets done with as FEW engineers as possible, instead of the least getting done with as many engineers as possible. But this would mean an end to high-salary social welfare, which could wreck the economy in the short term (but boost it in the long term). So either Mattis is either ignorant or just plain corrupt.