via Why Pentagon, facing ‘doomsday’ spending cuts, refuses to plan for them – CSMonitor.com.
Pentagon brass say they won’t even brook the possibility that $487 billion in mandated spending cuts – their ‘doomsday’ scenario – will actually come to pass. But if Congress doesn’t blink, say analysts, the Pentagon will be in dire straits.
I have always believed that those Pentagon folks are the most arrogant batch of people on God’s Green Earth. As stated above they absolutely refuse to even consider the possibility of cutting their budgets! I’m sure if push comes to shove they will say that a budget that is 10% lower than now will result in our country being taken over by terrorists! They will claim that this is imminent the same way as it was imminent that Iraq had WMDs and were going to use them on the world immediately if we didn’t invade that country.
Is there anyone out there that can stand up to our military monolith? We ordinary folks face 10% budget cuts on a regular basis lately. With the cost of healthcare, fuel and even food now days on an ever-increasing spiral it seems we have to give up more and more in order to just stay in place. We in the U.S. are five percent of the world’s population spend more on our military than the other ninety-five percent of the world combined! How can we get some sanity in this process and make a “real” cut in our war machine spending? The only thing the Pentagon folks want to is consider is maybe a “cut in the increase” in military spending once in a while.
Of course there are congressmen on both sides fo the aisle who will always pander to the generals. They are currently preaching gloom and doom if we dare to cut even a small percentage of our war making budgets. One of the best parts of our Constitution is that it made a private civilian head of the military establishment. That was intended to put a different perspective on things military. I know I use the phrase frequently but if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. In that light I expect all our generals and such who have spent their entire adult lives concentrating on killing the bad guys see only an absolute necessity for military force wherever they look at most any conflict around the world.
I wish our present “commander and chief” lived up to his rhetoric of the campaign trail in regards to our military establishment. Instead it seems that he has succumbed into the hammer mentality too. It is probably hard to disagree with all those guys, and for the most part they are still guys, with all the medals on their chests when they tell you something. It is also time for we in the U.S. to tell the rest of the world that we can no longer be the policemen in every corner of the earth. We must tell them that they need to take responsibility for the neighborhoods where they live. We can no longer afford to spend more than the rest of the world combined on a war machine. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to get out of the idea that we must spend more and more each year on our pentagon budgets. It is time to “just say no”…..
On Jan. 2, national security is set to receive a heavy blow if Congress fails to intervene. That is when a 10-year, $600 billion, across-the-board spending cut is to hit the Pentagon, equal to roughly 8 percent of its current budget.
RJ's Corner - Old Version 