Posted on 03/07/2016 8:09:01 AM PST by Kaslin
Off course as a Paulie you do. No surprise there
Let's say I have the money in my budget this year for a specialized doohickey that will not be available for delivery until next year.
I can not set that money aside. I have to spend that money on SOMETHING or next year (when the item is available) that amount will be cut from my budget.
This is how we end up with warehouses of 3.5" diskettes that we have to pay to store.
right on.
Ahem. Uh, who was it overthrew Libya, Egypt, attempted Syria, and left Iraq to ISIS? Wasn't the neocons. And the problem in Benghazi wasn't military involvement, it was lack of military involvement.
With a narrative this flawed it's hard to take the underlying case seriously (much less the tiresome invocation of "military-industrial complex" as if that vacuity held any meaning a half century after its use), but we should still examine it because the defense budget does need an overhaul. So, for that matter, does that of the rest of the federal government.
The answer to the contention that we are overcommitted in terms of overseas deployment is not to cut the size of the military, it's to cut the size of the commitment. Then we resize the military to meet the new commitment. To attempt to force policy by limiting resources guarantees the exhaustion and demoralization of those resources, which happen to be human beings as well as materiel. It's simply poor management practice, and in the military poor management practice can get people killed.
I am as dismayed as anyone by big-ticket wastage such as (apparently) the F-35, which looks to this amateur observer to be obsolescent before it is deployed. It's time for a reckoning on that program. It's time for a reassessment on all of them. If I purchase a bicycle I don't expect to take late delivery of a box full of an incomplete set of disassembled parts that may be a bicycle someday.
But that's not the failure of the military, it's the failure of civilian oversight. That would be a good place to start.
Paulie? Really? Guessing you are a liberal neo-con due to your immediate resort to name-calling. Get a grip. Next, you’ll be calling me a racist, facist, vulgarian, Trumpbot, ..., or maybe even isolationist. That’s a really scary one, please don’t!
Ron Paul likes it because it makes everything since the skeletonized, robbed-out Clinton-era budgets (when we weren't getting in training flight hours and ship deployments, when arms lockers were still drawn down from Clinton's air war in Jugland and "Desert Fox" camel-killing non-responses to the embassy and USS Cole bombings by Al Q'aeda) seem fat, plush, and wastefully over-funded. Nice, low baseline for comparisons.
The Clinton budget for 2001, be it ever remembered, was then pounced upon by Arbusto entering office, and being under demand, like his daddy, to generate an ever-widening stream of refund checks for blue-haired ladies in "good buildings" on Central Park (the people who tell schmucks like Yurtle the Turtle what to do), Arbusto did a couple of interesting "carve-outs" (of doubtful constitutionality, given than these were appropriated funds) of the existing DoD and NASA budgets (having sent Sean O'Keefe, a green-visor guy who knew jack about spaceflight, to be NASA's new Administrator), but otherwise impaired, and did not augment, DoD's budget until 9/11 forced his hand.
Just for the record.
Marker: Just like the Libertarians who want a military smaller than that deployed for the Indian Wars, there is a certain class of e-GOP cheeseparers who are neither "National Greatness Republicans" like McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, nor ex-Trotskyite Neocons like the Podhoretzes and Kristols, but just plain cheap bastards who want to suck the economy dry, play tennis in Newport, and go on world cruises on what used to be our money before they chiseled it off of us with bankster-modulated rising staples prices and falling wages. </off rant>
These are the guys who, if the rest of us are forced to learn Mandarin or Russian at gunpoint, will simply sail away to enjoy their permanent exiles in the Greek Islands, the Antilles, or Thai resorts. (Not forgetting Gstaad and Davos, scenes of so many happy plutocratic memories.)
But at least they picked our presidents for us before they left.
Ron Paul does not understand the basic defense doctrine of the United States, which is the Mahan Doctrine.
Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt created the doctrine, which has been held to ever since by presidents of both parties (not including the hostile anti-American, anti-Caucasian incumbent).
Pres. McKinley was the last in a long line of U.S. Presidents to have served in uniform during the Civil War, all of whom, except Chester Arthur (who was a New York Militia quartermaster corps major general), had served in field commands in the South -- McKinley, the most junior, as a captain -- and seen up close the devastation of war. Roosevelt traveled in the South after the war.
McKinley decided that such destructiveness must never be allowed to settle on U.S. territory again, and that henceforth the basic strategy of the United States would be to engage hostiles at sea or overseas, as far from U.S. shores as possible.
You don't do that with a 120,000-man army and a 150-ship navy.
You do do that with a big army full of highly-trained Rangers, Snake Eaters, paratroopers, tank divisions, mechanized divisions, and lots and lots of highly-accurate, big-bore, protected SP artillery, backed up by hordes of trained reservists and draftees in training. You do it with a big navy, an all-arms tactical doctrine, and a Marine Corps that will be the mailed fist that rides the long arm of the Fleet wherever the President shall direct, at the direction of the Congress. That's what you do. You engage the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Western Pacific and the U-boat flotillas everywhere, and the Nazi war machine in its Festung Europa, not on the Blue Ridge and the Piedmont.
What you do not do, ever, is to give an enemy access to the territory of the United States. (Such as by demographic aggression, eg. settling millions of Chinese in British Columbia and Panama, or by invasion across the Bering Sea or through Mexico and the Caribbean.) Never.
"Blowback" is a weasel-word used only by lying Leftists and *ussies.
"Blowback" is, some raghead finds out we drink Jack Black over here .... and sends an octet of suicide bombers to attack the distillery with vests and time bombs. That's "blowback": "You shouldn't have provoked the Prophet, unholy kufr may you all burn in hell!"
"Blowback". *ussy!
how much is the deficit, how big is the DoD budget? Last time looked we put the whole thing on the credit card annually....
You don’t like the word “blowback”. What word would you like to use to describe the unintended consequences of our military operations? Side-effects perhaps? Whatever you call it, it is a real phenomena because people will fight back. We would do the same thing if China or some other country was killing our people. Have you ever noticed how few Swiss are killed by terrorists?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.