People should have listened to what he said. Sure, he lied about a bunch of things, but there was a lot he told the truth about, and military spending was one of those things.

Anything less than 95% is base accommodationism. We don’t need any standing military forces, merely the skeleton crew that serves as a basis for mobilization in time of war that we always had in this country until we failed to disband our forces after WWII. The problem isn’t just that this massive expenditure is money ill spent that could be better spent, it’s that this much money forces people to hallucinate ever more vacuous rationales, in the form of ever less rational wars, to justify the expense. Having 12 carriers forces us to be at war at all times, if only to defend the 12 carrier force structure from its real enemies. No, these not any foreign navy or any terrorists, but the people who pay for the whole charade, you and me.

The others, the Taliban, are indigenous, but they are not numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The violent ones are possibly in the tens of thousands, but even that’s not entirely clear.

In the current Pakistani-Taliban fighting it’s been written that there are about 15,000 Pak and only 4,000 Taliban (at the start). Now they think it’s more like 2,000 Taliban. How many have been killed or escaped the battlefield isn’t entirely known.

The Pakistanis have more military, but they don’t feel they need to devote them to this fight. The Taliban militant insurgents are not insurmountable. They are not ghosts in the night. They are not all-powerful.

As for Afghanistan and our presence there: the dangerous foreigners there would be the drug buyers. Our efforts to break that trade doesn’t require the same kind of violence as we’re seeing in Pakistan, but it does require some force.

Lastly, our Afghanistan fight against the Taliban is cooperative with the Pakistanis. Our aim is to defeat that Taliban element which have gone into Pakistan (again they are the foreign militants) to try and impose Sharia law and possibly take over the country and it’s nukes. That’s unacceptable.

We’re trying to protect Pakistan and defend the west against the drug trade.

So, how are we the dangerous foreign element again? Who exactly did we unilaterally decide to attack because of our bloodlust? Remember 9/11?

…but it will not happen under Obama.
I don’t think He’ll cut 5%.

let’s ask chuck spinney to come back from retirement and put him in charge of the pentagon budget process.

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