Barbella
Senator
Awwww.....how does it feel? I mean, you're famous for doing that to others....notably ME.
Stop whining.
Shut down the military.
- Thread starter Arkady
- Start date
Awwww.....how does it feel? I mean, you're famous for doing that to others....notably ME.
Stop whining.
GordonGecko
President
Oh, right....showng up on one of your threads on race and mentioning "Is Pelosi botox'ed"..... is "stalking you"...I forgot.
Barbella
Senator
Oh, right....showng up on one of your threads on race and mentioning "Is Pelosi botox'ed"..... is "stalking you"...I forgot.
Nope. That's not even a good try. There have been SEVERAL threads NOT started NOR participated by me where YOU dragged my name into it.
YOU know it, and I know it.
Colorforms
Senator
They sacrificed themselves in the plane crashes. If you're not afraid to smash yourself into a building and become engulfed in a fireball, I doubt a nuke will scare you. You can only die so much.You mentioned that having a more powerful weapon prevents people with less powerful weapons from attacking you.
Seems the 9/11 attackers with their boxcutters were NOT afraid of our megaton warheads.
"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks"---General Berenger "War Games"
fairsheet
Senator
We're in an era of stagnant employment, yet all too many are crowing the wonderousness of significant cuts to our military and "universal single-payer healthcare".
Throwing millions of more people out of work, won't magically create new markets. We need to create the new markets first, then throw those people out of work.
Throwing millions of more people out of work, won't magically create new markets. We need to create the new markets first, then throw those people out of work.
Agree and disagree.
I think of Seattle when Boeing was on the verge of dying in the '60s. All that brain power, all that energy was transferred to other endeavors. It took time, and Boeing returned to life, only to move HQ to Chicago. The famous billboard...Will The Last Person Leaving Seattle Turn Out The Lights...was indicative of the negative outlook. Seattle (and Everett) surely struggled for a while, but today's and the more recent past's more diversified economy has it as one of the best spots we've got, as you know.
I think we need to figure out a way to do as much of both at the same time as we can.
fairsheet
Senator
Your response might be useful, if all employment eras were equal. They aren't. Oh.....and li'l secret.....Boeing's HQ is in Chicago now, only on paper.
Corporate paper is important.
I don't see how new markets can be created without new inventions, new technologies, and a trained workforce ready to implement them. While not every era is equal, some of the techniques that proved to work then can work now as well.
The GI Bill and educational benefits for training in the new technologies worked then...and will work now. Many of the military items are forward tech as it is...and these (perhaps, depending on security etc) can be moved into the marketplace, beginning the process.
Zam-Zam
Senator
fairsheet
Senator
Again....the WWII and Korean War GI bills came at a time of considerable economic, innovation, and market upside. We were transitioning from an almost exclusively war time economy to a peace time economy. There was an obvious shortage of skilled, peacetime, labor. Potential markets were abundant. The (mostly white male) former soldiers who took advantage of those GI Bills to either learn a skilled trade or earn a college degree, were virtually guaranteed good employment once they finished.
That's not the case today..by any stretch.
Arkady
President
That's the point here. Our country is so INSANELY militarized that even a man who ran as an anti-war candidate, and spoke so poignantly and frequently about it that the Nobel committee awarded him a Peace Prize before he'd had time to so much as begin to implement those lofty ideas, turns out to be the most militarily aggressive leader on the planet -- carrying out attacks on an unknown number of countries (thanks to abuse of state secrets doctrine), including a 200% spike in drone attacks since the time of his bellicose predecessor, and he proposes military budgets that are over twice what we had at the end of the Clinton years, and five times what any other country has. We're so militarized that our doves would be most other countries' fringe hawks.
Zam-Zam
Senator
When the government shuts down, those in power are not to be inconvenienced, that's for you and me. Thus, we can't allow WWII vets to view the Lincoln Memorial (it costs too much, and there's no money for that), but we can still fly drones into third world countries any time the CINC feels the need (that's vital to our nation's security).
I wonder if the Senate barbershop is closed? Somehow, I doubt it.
DAYTON — America’s taxpayers are paying a hefty price for the well-groomed appearance of U.S. senators and their staffs.
Since 1997, the Senate Hair Care shop consistently has run annual deficits of about $340,000, a taxpayer subsidy that keeps growing.
Critics point to the salon as an example of members of Congress living a lifestyle far removed from that of most of their constituents: On top of $174,000 salaries, they get health-care and pension benefits, and the public pays for their world travel and production of self-promoting newsletters and professionally recorded audio and video pieces.
Last year, the Senate Hair Care barbershop/salon ran a $401,000 deficit providing $20 cuts to senators, staff members and members of the public who visited the shop in the basement of the Russell Office Building, said Terry Gainer, the sergeant-at-arms and doorkeeper of the Senate. His wide-ranging duties include overseeing the hair-care operation.
Complete text:http://www.dispatch.com/content/sto...enates-barbershop-said-to-clip-taxpayers.html
Arkady
President
Sure. Here's one outside the area of the military, simply to suggest the scope of the difference in funding. The New York Yankees have long had the highest payroll in baseball. Obviously, that doesn't buy them championships every year... though they do have the best record and most championships overall, by a big margin. But their spending advantage is actually relatively small. Currently they spend less than 6% more than the next-closest team, and they don't even spend twice as much as the tenth-highest-spending team.
So, what would it take for the Yankees to have the same spending advantage relative to adversaries as the US currently has on the military? Well, first we'd need to more than quadruple their payroll. So, picture the Yankees get to absorb every player from Philly, the Red Sox, Detroit, San Fran, and the Angels, assembling a kind of all-star team.... not just all the stars of all those absorbed teams, but all the bench-warmers, too, just for depth. Only at that point would the Yankees would have the kind of payroll spending advantage over the LA Dodgers (the second-richest team) that the US military has over China (the second-best-funded military).
But even that doesn't do the analogy justice, because it doesn't account for the fact that the US has a bunch of close, powerful allies, whereas China doesn't. Among the top 15 militaries in the world, only two (China and Russia) aren't particularly friendly with the US, and most are actually closely involved in mutual defense agreements with us, and have a recent history of fighting by our side (UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Australia and Canada).
So, to make our sports analogy better, how do we account for those alliances? Well, we can treat them as the minor leagues. Picture if the Yankees, in addition to absorbing the five other top-flight teams I mentioned, also had a couple scrub major league franchises that acted as minor league squads for them, on which they could draw as needed -- say Miami and Houston, for example. And say the Dodgers had no minor league system at all.
At some point along the line, more spending became immaterial. If such a team still can't win, it's not because it needs to spend more, it's because management is spending the money they have horribly.
Anyway, there are all sorts of problems with your analogy, but a key one is that, in the real world, the nuclear deterrent already has us covered for defense from the kind of attack that requires a massive military arsenal. Even if we swapped conventional militaries with, say, Canada, a country like China isn't going to risk open conventional warfare with us, because if they ever started winning, we'd probably turn Beijing and Shanghai into identical pools of radioactive molten glass. No nuclear power has ever faced full-scale invasion. Heck, even pathetic little North Korea keeps the US at bay with a handful of nukes.
So, right off the bat, most of our military spending isn't really about defense. It's about being able to stomp on little countries like Iraq on a whim.... we want to have such superiority that the conventional war phase of such engagements is a cakewalk. We want to be so overwhelmingly over-funded that even if the case for war is so laughably unconvincing that none of our key allies will make any forces available to help us, we can still go in and do it ourselves (thereby short-circuiting the benefit of their wise counsel). But that just invites us into meat grinders where what happens after the conventional warfare tears us to shreds, and all our glorious military machine means nothing, because we're being bled by a thousand little cuts. Then it's like trying to fight mosquitoes with a bazooka. If you don't want to get drained by the mosquitoes, staying out of the swamps is key -- buying a second bazooka to fight them is entirely beside the point.
Colorforms
Senator
The problem with your analogy is that no matter how much you spend on a team, they can only be as good as their best players. Our military, on the other hand, are as good as their leadership, their training, their numbers, and their equipment. The more you spend, the more training, troops, and equipment you get. If you are in a situation in which you have less than adequate amounts of any of those, you lose more people.
I wouldn't want my children fighting an equal, or even a closely matched force. You're just asking your people to give their lives. I think we owe it to them and to us to be overwhelming.
Arkady
President
I don't want my children fighting an equal or closely matched force, either. But at what point do you say "OK, that's enough." My guess is that if we were spending 110% as much as the next-closest country, the militarists would say it should be 150%. If it was 150%, they'd say it should be 200%. And so on, until we get to the point where even spending 600% as much as any other country doesn't cause any of those militarists to say, "Ok, that's excessive even in my eyes." For them, you can never spend enough. The whole nation is basically just a revenue-building engine for growing and supporting a military.
Plus, it's largely beside the point when it comes to making us safer. To play with the gun-fight analogy, China's got itself a $160 pistol. We've got ourselves a $160 pistol, too. And another one strapped to our leg. And a $320 rifle slung across our back. And another $160 pistol for our other hand. Are all of those additional weapons making us even a little safer from the risk that China might shoot us?
They're probably actually putting us at greater risk, since they could give us a false confidence to go strutting through a bad neighborhood picking fights for no good reason. So, people like me would rather sell off a couple of those pistols and just rely on the one pistol and the rifle, which still leaves us much better armed than anyone else. Plus, we have the fact that all our close friends are also packing heat, whereas China and Russia have got no real friends.
Colorforms
Senator
No system is perfect, but I am of the opinion that I would rather have the gun and not need it, than need the gun and not have it. As I've said, every shortcoming in our defense costs us people, and we only have to lose once for all of this to end. How much is America worth to you?
Corruptbuddha
Governor
You're putting the cart before the horse. In order to downsize military spending to the levels you propose, we would FIRST have to change the mission of that military. Asking the military to do what we demand of it currently, on far less money, is naive and dangerous.
The primary reason we spend so much on defense is that the WORLD expects US to do all the heavy lifting militarily.
That has to change.
Let us then change our interventionist foreign policy to one of strictly national defense, close some of the 800 bases we have established overseas and bring the war in Afghanistan to a hasty close.
Then, and only then, can we think of cutting defense spending to your proposed levels.
Arkady
President
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. If we spend as much as we do, there's not much reason for our allies to heap more spending on top of that. I think that if we signaled very clearly that serious spending cuts were coming, of the sort that might leave people exposed if they were counting on the US to ride to the rescue unilaterally, other major nations would step their game up a bit. It wouldn't take much. Even if the EU nations were only spending 1.5% of GDP on their militaries, on average, that would be around a $250 billion combined military spend -- far and away more than China, for example. Throw in Australia, Japan, and Canada, and you've got an allied military that could handle a threat by any nation on Earth, other than by the US itself.
As for your main point, I agree that downsizing military spending means downsizing the mission, too. If we were to scale back to a military budget of, say, twice the next-closest country, saving us over $350 billion per year, that couldn't all come out of pure waste. A lot would require a change of the mission. But there are ways the mission can easily change that would actually make us safer, not less safe. A lot of our projected power is more of a provocation or a vulnerability than a necessary strategic asset. For example, Al Qaeda cited US military presence in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia as part of the reason for the 9/11 attack. We could scale back to a primarily defensive force, with only enough of an excess to run a single operation against a mid-sized country at a time, without any allied help (and by operation, I mean only the war, not the bloody post-war occupation -- if that's going to be needed, we better line up allies to do as much bleeding as we'll be doing, before we decide it's worth it).
Corruptbuddha
Governor
The primary point is if we start cutting back money BEFORE we pull back mission.....we run a massive risk of failure.
We have to change the polices first.
