Posted on 05/05/2018 8:32:47 AM PDT by davikkm
America is a country drowning in debt, slowly but surely, and the United States’ trillion dollar (annually) military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower put it more than half a century ago, is part of our national disaster. Before going all MAGA on me, just answer this question: when was the last time the US military defended the homeland? The answer is pretty simple if you know your history: in 1945. The sad truth is that the United States has world’s largest (and best funded) army, yet realistically speaking, it has no (military) enemies. No nation on Earth even comes close to having the capabilities of invading the US, and no desire to do so, or at least that’s how I view the world in 2018. Again, realistically speaking, the US military would do just fine with 20% of its actual budget.
(Excerpt) Read more at investmentwatchblog.com ...
Of course, no one has shown aggression against us BECAUSE of our budget.
Not to mention some of our finest re-enlist with a sock puppet speaking for them....
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
We're spending about 3.5% of output on defense. Hardly a budget buster. During Eisenhower's terms, we spent north of 10%.
Our spending problems are rooted in the regulatory state industrial complex, the educational industrial complex, the welfare state industrial complex and now, the environmental lobby industrial complex.
As a retired guy, I partially agree. I’m sick and tired of our folks dying overseas fighting wars that our European “allies” are too wimpy to even think about, while our bottom dwelling congress allows our country to have open borders.
If we are not careful, we’ll need our military to do the unthinkable: defend us against ourselves.
And decimate Mexifornia.
Note also that decades of parsimony on defense were undone by WWII, during which we spent 2x GDP on defense, or the equivalent of $40T.
The problem with our spending is entitlements!
O & M spending on the government is insignificant compared to entitlements.
Everyone’s hand is in everyone else’s pocket and we like it!
See post five.
Only uninformed people (who never actually look at the budget) and traitors within (who desire the destruction of the United States) would state that we are over spending.
If you are the former, educate yourself.
If you are the latter, go to a site for likeminded people.
Hey, don’t be messin’ with my retirement check. ;-)
“A Quick Thought On America’s Useless Trillion Dollar Military Industrial Complex”
Perhaps too quick.
But it is great to live in a country where a writer like Chris Black can say what he thinks . . . without thinking.
That said, the article is flawed in my estimation. The author says we don't need a powerful military because nobody (9/11 aside) attacks us. The single biggest reason nobody attacks us is BECAUSE of our powerful military.
To say that nobody has the capability or interest to attack the US is downright false.
The very fact that the US has a powerful and well-funded military industrial complex goes far in suppressing any assertive action of other foreign powers, before they even begin scheming.
Be prepared for war, that you may enjoy peace. The mistake comes, when the people in power get itchy and want to put all this military might to use, in ways that circumvent diplomacy and arms’-length transactions.
To jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.
And it is much more authoritative to speak from a position of strength than a position of weakness.
I always hear about Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex but very little about his warnings of public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. Why is That? Sounds like global warming.
Our defense budget is about one thing: lives. Sure, we could peal back our warfighting ability to the largely non-existent threats we see before us today.
And tomorrow very real threats that are a complete match for us would appear. Between WW1 and WW2, the industrialized nations did just that, and Germany and Japan saw their opportunity and took it.
Today no one will even try because they simply do not possess the capability.
Purely defensive warfighting is much cheaper to prepare for, but it is also doomed to failure. It is far better to keep offensive warfighting capability in place than hope you have time to build it before your enemy breaches your defenses, as we had to do in World War 2.
There is a tremendous amount of waste and corruption in defense, but what has congress ever touched where that is not the case? The corruption in all of our spending is but another face of the same monster that is still working to undo the last election.
Last time I recall is when Iraq was using weaponized anthrax on us and afganistan stepped up its heroin operation in response to the open declaration of Jihad on America by the occupiers of Mecca.
Would have been said and done if we had not allowed the CIA to put in the Manchurian Candidate Barry Muslim zero with his half a dozen SSN’s. Without him and the Clinton’s pumping up the Muslim Brotherhood and arming ISIS through Benghazi it would have been all over.
The swamp are traitors selling our souls for the New World Order. Very poisonous snakes...
The correct way to asses spending is not as a percentage of a budget which depending on various factors can vary wildly. But rather as a percentage of GDP. Nor is the Eisenhower administration what I would look to as good standard. I prefer the Coolidge administration when the US military was not the policeman of the world but the defense force of the United States. Lastly I find debate by insult to be singularly unpersuasive and often a sign of a weak position. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve heard the “we don’t have any enemies” too many times now. We may not have enemies who can challenge us on the conventional battlefield but we do have enemies (like Chris Black) who would love to see the government change what it spends its discretionary money on.
I would be only too pleased to see us withdraw forces from the Middle East but we know already how that turns out. So if our enemies (however JV they are — they can hurt us and we should not have to sit and take it) continue to thrive in lawless places then we need to have the best defense we can afford.
The very honest truth is that (as the President says) peace is a function of strength and part of having a strong military is keeping up with the capabilities that are provided by technology.
The other truth is that it costs to do this. We tried in the Al Gore period to do away with quality assurance and peer review. It resulted in a lot of systems with major flaws.
No, our system has its flaws, and they result from human flaws. We are wiser to keep our military budget adequate and continue to face our enemies with strength.
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