But Bll Clinton gutted the military!

-G

Since the expenditure is always correlated to the ability of the military; I have always wondered one thing.

How is it that a nation like North Korea can become an existential and grave threat to the United States for such a miniscule fraction of the amount of money it takes the U.S. to combat that threat?

On a Dollar-for-Dollar basis the North Koreans must have significantly more effective and efficient servicemen, equipment, and tactics. Considering how effective and efficient they are comparatively, perhaps we should kill two birds with one stone. We could disband our expensive military apparatus, and directly hire the North Korean military to replace it for pennies on the Dollar to what we’ve grown accustom to spending. We’d normalize relations with North Korea immediately, and we’d have all kinds of money left over for record spending on sexy parties and champagne!

If we don’t spend more on tall ladders, Sarah Palin will not be able to see Putin rearing his head.

I’m trying to remember the battle of Juneau.

Nope.

Battle of Juneau: Allied Forces land on Obama Beach. You can look it up.

It’s the only jobs program the GOP will allow.

#1 in military expenditures

#1 in population & percentage of population in prison

#1 in health care costs per capita

Democrats in power do nothing to make these better,

but remember, always vote (D), no matter what! because its working so well for us!

frothymouthed ravings from the right notwithstanding, pushing back against those idiots is not the way you should be pushing.

from a perspective of sanity, if you vote for a party that continually makes such statistics worse, you are voting against your interests.

notice how the (D) power structure is keeping single payer off the table?

while countless billions are funneled to the military?

who cares what the teabaggers say? they are waaaay down their own reality tunnel, they do not read FDL.

there is a huge vacuum where an authentic left politics should be, and nature abhors a vacuum.

over in Europe, rightist populism is filling the vacuum left by oligarchic politics.

Continued co-dependence on the worthless Democratic Party by the ostensible Left in the USA makes the outbreak of Right populism here more likely, and it won’t be a pretty sight.

Palin’s remembering the invasion of Attu and Kiska.

Awesome idea!

Can you suggest a better alternative? Greens & Libertarians aren’t going to win any time soon, and R’s are worse than D’s…

Simpler solution (than teaching the NK regulars english): Tell Congress & the DOD to stop pissing away billions on projects that aren’t wanted and don’t work.

Probably just about as likely to happen as hiring the North Koreans instead… :)

And if you want to see where the Pentagon proposes to spend it, go here. Lots of links to various budget documents and to other sites with more links, such as:

Air Force

Army

Navy

The sad part is that the cost does not reflect much, if any, real addition to our defense capability, even if we adopt the paranoid, military-first mindset that constantly used to hold up Pearl Harbor as the never-again scenario we must guard against. Defense spending defends two things only: [1] the profits of a small and exceedingly unproductive segment of our economy (contractors that sell nothing anyone really wants and the lobbyists that in turn sell them) and [2] the careers of the defense bureaucrats/politicians that depend on [1].

I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, but I seem to remember that the much ballyhooed and very, very expensive Ronnie Raygun defense build up actually bought fewer fighter planes per dollar spent than the much reviled Carter budgets. We bought the B-1 bomber that Carter had tried to cancel, even though Carter said it wasn’t needed and didn’t work well enough to replace the old B-52s. But we ALSO bought the alternative, the stealth B-2. Yet, weirdly enough, it turned out that the B-1s weren’t needed, didn’t work well enough to replace B-52s, and cost so much that we only bought a handful of B-2s at very uneconomical per-unit prices. And, of couse, we didn’t really need the latter either. B-52s still did the bulk of what work there was for heavy bombers.

Bad as the waste was, it was by no means the worst product of the excess: it led to a reversal of normal requirements-based procurement. To maintain defense spending at the desired levels, spending had to drive defense requirements which in turn had to drive policy. Politically, spending demanded an enemy at a time when the anemic old Commies were having too much trouble paying the bills to feel belligerent. So Reagan invented Al-Qaeda (literally) with Saudi Arabia’s help and turned a blind eye to the Saudi-funded Pakistani nuclear program. If an Islamic bomb was the price we had to pay to keep the Soviets stirred up enough to look like a threat and the Permanent Republican Majority on track, then Reagan, Bush the Elder, and their ilk were all for it.

So the end result of justifying spending with phantom threats was real threats: the first attack on US soil since the aforementioned Pearl Harbor and the dreaded possibility of terrorist nukes or a China/Pakistan/India nuclear war.

But no worries, both Reagan and Poppy Bush got extra new-build Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers named after themselves. Their buddies in the industry got to build and outfit same. Only a dozen or so Reago-Bush officials were convicted of fraud and insider trading and such. So, overall, a win-win.

Does anyone else think that we should at least rename the carriers? Maybe the “Reagan” could become the “James Carter” and the “Bush” could be the “United Flight 93″?

That’s true. The Republicans want more defense spending, the Democrats are merely unwilling to sensibly decrease it.

The US Military is similar to the US Medical System.

Not cost effective.

We should outsource our military needs to the Chinese. We could get the job done of 10% of the current cost.

There are Defense contractors located in 48 states, AZ has several plus the military bases. These business hold our congresscritters hostage with jobs and local income. This is all by design and it will take huge process to remove them out.

Can you imagine pissing off Honeywell or Allied Signal with cutting their contacts?

It always gets me that borrowing money to increase destructive defensive capability is looked at as prudent and sensible. Borrowing money to build civil infrastructure is going to bankrupt us though. It’s OK to have bridges collapse, but if we can’t drop bombs on foreign lands then we’ve lost our mojo.

I’ve worked for defense contractors. May be doing civilian work for DoD again. I’ve got friends that work for Lockheed Martin. And I have no doubt that the money spent on defense could be better spent elsewhere.

Talking with a lead engineer at Lockheed a month or so ago when “cuts” were announced – he’s working on the MKV (a system that targets MIRV re-entry vehicles). He’s adamant that his work is “producing something”, and that it is needed, even though it reinvigorates a strategic arms race with Russia, the only significant holder of MIRV’d missiles outside the US. I still gibe at him as a welfare king that buys lots of toys with taxpayer money. He’s not a ghetto queen driving a cadillac, he’s a suburban cracker king riding a Ducati or one of many dirt bikes.

And I’ll know that I’m working for taxpayers again if I do go to work for the DoD again.

Message to Congress critters:
Thank you for supporting our progressive agenda and please vote no on the supplemental.
Responses were pretty good on the first 20 I called. Will call the rest later. They are getting a lot of calls but the lines were never jammed.

Smile and dial…put down the bailing buckets for a while please ans …
Smile and dial

And to see how the DoD budget is generated inside the Pentagon, go to this link.

The biggest budget for the biggest polluter in America that pollutes with impunity around the world.

By Joshua Frank, AlterNet. Posted May 12, 2008.

The nation’s biggest polluter isn’t a corporation. It’s the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste — more than the top three chemical companies combined.

Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon’s partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way.

The single greatest consumer/waster of fossil fuels.

Some interesting facts to pass along regarding the US Military and its consumption of oil. According to a Energy Bulleting report from earlier this year, the Pentagon is the world’s largest consumer of oil. In fact, there are only 35 countries (out of 210) in the world that consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

They are a waste, period. It’s time to decommission the Pentagon.

“It always gets me that borrowing money to increase destructive defensive capability is looked at as prudent and sensible. Borrowing money to build civil infrastructure is going to bankrupt us though.”

You are right. It is even sillier than you point out when one realizes that defense expenditures depreciate at a spectacular rate compared to civil infrastructure and offer little or no return on the investment (ROI). A bridge stays in service for 100 years or more with minimal maintenance and faciliates commerce and communication, both of which generate economic growth and revenues that offset the original cost–ROI. A jet fighter is obsolete within 10-20 years with lots and lots of very expensive maintenance. Yet, except for the profits earned for its sharedholders, it does nothing for the civilian economy.

Some people believe that the role of the federal government is to protect us, not to provide for us. Thus, defense spending is fine, but the stimulus plan that was passed goes against their belief of the role of the federal government…

I found a 2000 GAO report that underscores your point about the relative waste of just supporting weapons systems, accounting for 75% of the cost in the system life cycle.

Democracy Now is reporting that US defense spending accounts for 58% of the global defense spending, not 42%.

You’re probably thinking of “Operation Anchorage”, which is downloadable content for the Fallout 3 game, in which the Chinese take over Alaska. See, Palin knew there was a real threat after all!