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| It's time for an updated military strategy. |
Let me get this straight: we have drone aircraft that we build for a few thousand dollars that can fly 50,000 feet in the air using solar power which costs nothing, target an enemy and obliterate them with a hail of gunfire and Mitt Romney wants to spend billions of dollars to build a bunch of metal boats to float around in the ocean, burn up diesel fuel, kill a bunch of fish and provide fun target objects for our future enemy drones? Yeah, why don't we go back to using muskets, because, by-golly that's how we did it in the good old days! This is frightening, people. How is it that this candidate has not been laughed out of contention for any military policy position? I hope this is all an elaborate practical joke!
~R. Charan Pagan
information systems technologist, musician, writer, filmmaker
Los Angeles, CA 90017
http://www.reclaimingourbirthright.blogspot.com/
From SB: I hope you don’t really think that ships are outdated for military use?????
ReplyDelete@SB: Yeah, I think the days of lumbering behemoth vessels is nearing its end. Romny’s claim that the Navy needs 300 boats is based on a 2005 assessment that was later revised downward. We spend more on our military than the next 13 countries (ten of whom are our allies). What, exactly are we trying to accomplish? If we have drone escorts for surveillance and firepower, satellite guidance and improved monitoring capability onboard the craft, I don’t see much need for giant fleets like we used to have. Or much out there that can be a threat to us. While dealing with rogue actors (terrorists), lighter craft with less firepower but more monitoring capabilities would seem more effective to me.
ReplyDeleteThe big battleships are great jobs programs but we can’t afford them. That’s what really gets me about this neo-conservative movement: they will scream about any waste in government spending on welfare programs but then they want to hand a blank check to the military and not monitor how the money is being spent.
If you know my politics, I’m always going after the big fish. The largest, most egregious abuse of government or the law. And there is an argument to be made that government wastes more money on social programs and inefficiency than it wastes on the military, and that the military at least has the critically important role of securing and protecting the entire country. But it is because the military is so important that we have to stop the abuse there. The bigger picture is that waste within the military industrial complex goes to a few people at the top who use their money buy enough politicians to ensure that the game never changes. So, until we get the balls to take them on, this country goes nowhere.
We need to fix both sides but from my prospective, the people who own this government (the people that are funding Romney’s campaign, and, to a lesser degree, the Obama campaign) are doing what they can to prevent anything from being fixed. They’ve already got it fixed.