My friend Rob and my online pal Ellen asked me to clarify some of my earlier ideas about spending items and cultural sophistication vs weaponry. Ellen called it the “Duck Doctrine” (ha!).
Can anybody seriously believe we need to spend trillions to keep the US safe? Of course we do not!
By cultural sophistication I mean that defense dep’t needs to know other nations much better, especially before and after we make them our enemy or start wars. In Iraq I understand there were a remarkably low number of arabic speaking analysts involved, and even if there had been Cheney and Bush would have proceeded to implement the Perl / Wolfowitz PNAC world viewhttp://www.newamericancentury.org/ I agree with some of the PNAC stuff but also feel traditional conservatives naively think that people left to their own devices will choose freedom and democracy over fighting. I don’t agree and think we are very much the products of evolutionary pressures that favored short term, fairly narrow thinking.
Lest I be confused with a Tea Party guy I thought I better respond fast. I’m a real conservative thank you, not those fake ones who overspend on military and advocate for American theocracy. I want the founders back in charge and that means a Govt that governs best governs least, small military, entrepreneurial capitalism, and big personal freedom. Neither Republicans nor Democrats advocate that approach and that failure continues to our great peril.
We foolishly squander defense spending building weapons and paying for too many soldiers when we should be approaching things more cleverly and strategically, cutting big weapons systems in favor of clever infrastructure campaigns (building schools and clinics) that are followed with marketing to show how nice we are. Our military campaigns are generally “self fulfilling militarily” in that our approach is so aggressive and lacking in cultural know-how that the locals don’t have time to see we are the good guys. (and our guys are almost always the good guys even though many on the left don’t get that obvious point). Our intentions are good, our execution is bad, our military expense account is WAY too large.
It’s $12,000 to build a school in Pakistan where it’s $ 20,000 for one JDAM “smart bomb”. … and by bomb standards JDAMS are incredibly cheap – the military has non-nukes that cost over 400,000 per bomb. The point is that we should be much more proactive about building infrastructure and good will. There’s a big perceived difference between building and bombing. If the Taliban destroys the school the next month we’ve won a moral victory, but if we bomb and kill 10 bad guys and 1 good guy we’ve often lost moral ground in these regions. This simple, negative equation is going on all the time and it’s why the USA has so much trouble extricating ourselves from international conflicts.
Is Defense waste the only spending issue? Of course not. We are a land of reckless entitlements. Most getting social security do NOT need the money and did not contribute to the extent they are getting paid. Politically it’s very hard to reign in spending – we foolishly reward our politicians for their spending sprees, forgetting that overspending in “our” state or district is magnified a hundredfold all over the nation. Balanced budget is a no-brainer. In fact it should be a declining budget. Ben Franklin suggested that revolution might be called for if taxes went above 10%. Franklin frugality is the kind of fiscal responsibility we need, and note that Franklin was a super progressive guy back in the day!
More about defense spending: https://joeduck.com/2007/12/03/make-ads-not-war/
Joe Duck 
Your desire to cut the DoD may be a noble sentiment, yet we should keep in mind that thousands if not millions of Mericans depend on defense-related industries for their paycheck, whether that’s wealthy defense contractors, engineers/techies at Northrop, etc officers, soldiers, or the chumps who do the maintenance and so forth at Edwards AFB. The DoD’s a mega-racket, and not likely to be dismantled easily–any big DoD contract, whether supersonic jets, or a supercarrier brings in a massive amount of shekels to US communities–not just to the service-people, but all the businesses in the area (and many small businesses boom when some “men and women in uniform” decide to patronize their store, or restaurant or bar, brothel, etc).
Gruntonomics, Duck–war’s good for bidness. Thomas Pynchon’s novel “V” describes the madness of the military economy Norfolk VA pretty well. You see it in San Diego/Mission viejo as well (see one Supercarrier in the SD bay, and…some might nearly cross themselves)
Wow. Rand Paul said nearly the same thing Duck has re cutting the military budget. It’s like the ghost of Ayn Rand haunts you both!
Rand Paul deserves some credit for mentioning the DoD budget, even if it was probably for the wrong reasons –that’s more than most Demos have done for years (Demos love DoD slushbuckets as much as the GOP does–Feinstein regularly comes down to SoCal to praise various DoD programs..and collect her kickback shekels (allegedly!) .
Rand Paul appears to be an Isolationist, of sorts. Though many teary-eyed liberals (and macho hawks) don’t care for isolationist doctrines, there’s something appealing about it (Woodrow Wilson was an isolationist in WWI, until finally capitulating (probably rightfully…but still debatable). The US shouldn’t be obligated to play world cop. We don’t mess in other countries’ business, unless they directly mess with us (more or less). And the US Prez doesn’t have to be the hip ambassador spending thousands on his globe-trotting missions.
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