And the warmongers waste no time

[theVOID]

I follow there seems to be complete agreement between liberals and libertarians

Even they have defense establishments or war profiteering industries in their districts.

Oh yeah, which self-described libertarians would those be?

Void, you know how they say you can't really learn to speak another language unless you live there? I think you need, after the next earthquake, to come live in the states for a while. By all means, live in a trailer park in Mississippi for a couple of months...where you can learn about why jesus hates New Zealand ( wherever it is) and the French. Then come to Arizona where we can have a couple of beers and I'll introduce you to my Birther relatives. Then you can go to Iowa where they think Michelle Bachmann is presidential timber....and so on.

At the end of the year you'll go back to NZ and never dare leave its shores again....even if it sinks into the Pacific!

libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a language, people who are described as being libertarians are in general terms socially liberal, free market proponents and non-interventionist - You can no doubt find some who are varying degrees of one or the other such as "conservative libertarians" who are shy on the social scale or "left libertarians" who support more social spending or even public schools and healthcare, you can no doubt find some who believe absolutely stupid shit, that's true of any people who fall into a general description, but as an argument against the philosophy it's naught but an ad hominem.

I'd love to meet your birther relatives, it will be like visiting a zoo Maybe afterwards we can go and racially profile some Mexicans.

Bachman isn't a libertarian, go google "Bachman Libertarian", the third listing is the forums here... Yeah, the idea of Bachman being a libertarian is literally that bullshit, most of the results are from libertarians attacking Bachman - She is clearly a Neo-con, she's lukewarm on economic freedoms and absolutely abysmal as far as social freedoms are concerned.

[Minimalist]

libertarianism is a political philosophy,

Not over here. That's what I'm trying to get you to understand. The prime proponents of it are the Koch brothers who are a couple of rich motherfuckers who want to gut the government's regulatory capacity so they can rape, pillage and slaughter their way across the landscape even more. Yeah, they couch it in terms of "liberty" to make it appealing to the dolts but Bill Maher considers himself a "libertarian" because he wants pot legalized. Lots of libertarians are that way because the republicans ( which is what they really are) are prime sustainers of the prison-industrial complex so they can have a very lucrative war on "crime."

The word as you are trying to use it has no meaning in the states.

Maybe afterwards we can go and racially profile some Mexicans.

That is easier than you think. They are the ones working while the tea bagging shitheads are protesting.


Tea Bagging Shithead:





Mexicans:

[Jackalope]

The corollary to this statement is that to protect your nation, one's nation should conduct itself as to not piss off as many other nations as possible.

Want to protect your nation: maintain wars only on a single or at most a double front. The US military is in a large number of minor conflicts across the world that it is gaining nothing from... and stretched thin it costs more and takes more damage as a whole.

[popeyespappy]

Now factor in spending per capita between the US and China and watch that disparity triple!

[Anomalocaris]

I would mention a recent Navy Times article that points out the US Navy has more combat vessels than the next thirteen navies in the world combined. Navies are expensive to maintain and build. There is also a military saying that goes "The world's most expensive hobby is having the world's second best Navy."

That said, a naval force in a general war is not the same as an army. For the most part, in a war, you can induct millions of soldiers if necessary, but generally you only have the ships you started the war with. Because of the length of time it takes to make combat vessels, few replacements will come on line for any ships damaged or sunk during a war (note WWII - neither the US Navy nor the Imperial Japanese Navy significantly added replacements to the number of combat vessels after combat started - ignoring the Japanese sinking of the USS Panay which occured four years before the USA entered WWII, in 1937 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e...y_incident

At the time the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyed the USS Panay (PR-5), the US Government was keen on not entering WW2 against Imperial Japan. Our navy was not ready for such combat. Japan had a proven-in-combat aircraft carrier fleet. Note in 1937, the Japanese destroyed the Panay using aircraft. (The Wikipedia article above includes a link to a newsreel made during the attack, showing the Japanese attack on the ship.)

We already knew of the destructive power of naval aircraft, but it takes a long time to build an aircraft carrier. At the start of WW2, we only had three fleet carriers, versus the six Japanese carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor.

I served aboard the USS Saratoga (CV-60) from 1994 to 1995, which had been laid down before the start of WW2 hostilities for the USA, but only commissioned in the final months of WW2. It was decommissioned in 1994. Once built, we don't really want to throw them away, either, because of the expense and time of building them. - James.

USS Saratoga (CV-60) was ordered on 23 July, 1952, laid down on 16 Dec 1952, and commissioned on 14 April, 1956.

At the time of Pearl Harbor attack, the US had CV-1 through CV-8 in commission. That's 8 carriers by my count.

Let's hope when you draw lessons from history, it's from history that actually happened, and not from what sounded good.

[Violet]

The corollary to this statement is that to protect your nation, one's nation should conduct itself as to not piss off as many other nations as possible.

Want to protect your nation: maintain wars only on a single or at most a double front. The US military is in a large number of minor conflicts across the world that it is gaining nothing from... and stretched thin it costs more and takes more damage as a whole.

Dead men can't fight back. To protect a nation from potential assault: the best way is to annihilate all of the assaulters.

The only reason to not do this: your nation is too weak to do so.

There certainly is no reason with that much military spending in comparison to not expand. Sure, it pisses a few people off: what are they going to do against a military that massive with top of the line relevancy? Banding together against it leaves the UN open to flanking from Russia and China, both powerful nations in their own right... and it allows the collective middle east to regroup and push back into an offensive war.

There are only benefits to taking advantage of the situation. The fuck does a debt matter past ideology? You cannot have less than nothing... so if you take even a little something you have gained in such a case as they suspend your money and demand compensation for your debt. Regardless of the short term economic effects for the populace: it leads to a very longterm prosperity.

Either you're a republic and you fucking act like one (slash that war budget into maybe a little more than is required for shipping lanes to be kept open)... or you are an executive dictator and you fucking act like it (obliterate your enemies beneath your heels while you still can, and loot everything)

Anything less is as woefully ineffective as a teenager who can't make up her mind if she wants a tattoo or not and gets a little dot, calling the matter resolved by that compromise, instead of having any personal responsibility for their decision. When they later regret having done so or not having gotten a nice tattoo, they will probably blame anything but themselves

[Minimalist]

That's 8 carriers by my count.

CV-1 was the Langley a converted oiler. CV's 2 and 3 were the Lexington and Saratoga which were converted battle cruisers. Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, (1942) and Sara survived the war.

The Langley was CV-4 which was built from the keel up as a carrier but so small that she was effectively an escort carrier and ferry in the Atlantic.

CV-5 was the Yorktown ( Sunk at Midway, 1942 )

CV-6 was the Enterprise which survived the war.

CV-7 was the Wasp ( Sunk supporting Marine operations on Guadalcanal, 1942)

CV-8 was the Hornet ( Sunk at the Battle of Santa Cruz ( 1942)


If the Japanese had managed to sink the Big E and the Sara in 1942, the fact is that American industrial production would have ensured that by mid 1943 we would have outweighed them in carriers and every other class of screening vessel with ships that were newer, faster and had radar. There was no "decisive battle" in the Pacific. The Japanese were beaten before they ever attacked. And, they knew that going in.

"Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices."

--Adm Isoroku Yamamoto

[Judas BentHer]

It doesn't really matter what people think about our troops being dispatched to serve abroad in foreign countries. It's an all volunteer military and it is what it is. They're there.

I don't condemn a single person serving in the military. In fact, when I see someone here in uniform I shake their hand and thank them for their service. They do the job's those who bitch about their job, don't want to do.

We need a strong military, unless we haven't noticed even on forums, there are a lot of people in the world that hate our guts and want us dead. So, whether abroad or here,the military and personnel deserve all the funding they can get for the job they volunteered to give their life to, for the country and her people they thought was worth the sacrifice.

[Anomalocaris]

That's 8 carriers by my count.

CV-1 was the Langley a converted oiler. CV's 2 and 3 were the Lexington and Saratoga which were converted battle cruisers. Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, (1942) and Sara survived the war.

The Langley was CV-4 which was built from the keel up as a carrier but so small that she was effectively an escort carrier and ferry in the Atlantic.

CV-5 was the Yorktown ( Sunk at Midway, 1942 )

CV-6 was the Enterprise which survived the war.

CV-7 was the Wasp ( Sunk supporting Marine operations on Guadalcanal, 1942)

CV-8 was the Hornet ( Sunk at the Battle of Santa Cruz ( 1942)


If the Japanese had managed to sink the Big E and the Sara in 1942, the fact is that American industrial production would have ensured that by mid 1943 we would have outweighed them in carriers and every other class of screening vessel with ships that were newer, faster and had radar. There was no "decisive battle" in the Pacific. The Japanese were beaten before they ever attacked. And, they knew that going in.

CV-4 was the Ranger.

The point is the USN did not have 3 carriers when the Japanese attacked with 6. There were 6 US fleet carriers to match the 6 fleet carriers available to the Japanese.

The vessels with which the USN would outweigh the Japanese were not exactly conceived in response to war. The USN had always been superior to the Japanese navy and in fact had begun a truly enormous buildup on top of existing superiority 2 years before Pearl Harbor.

By comparison, the Japanese navy, always smaller than the USN, were already taxing the Japanese economy to the limit even before the war. As a result, the build up the Japanese envisioned to prepare themselves for war was only ambitious in comparison to Japanese industrial capability. It was puny compared to the buildup untaken by the US or even Britain.

Rather than harping on the theoretical advantage of always being massively armed and overwhelmingly equipped as if money sprouts from the ground for every round of ammunition fired, one should examine the position of the Japanese who carried a peacetime military burden so overwhelming that it suffocated their industrial development, so that when war came, they managed but one anemic squeek of a build up that made no difference.

BTW, 20 years ago a prediction that Chinese economy would eventually rival the size of American economy in 100 years was considered outlandish. 20 years later China has already overtaken us in manufacturing, in some some key areas by a enormous margin (Chinese steel industry is 7 times ours), and conservative forecast would have them overtake us overall in as little as 5 years.

At this rate, should war come, it would not be the lesson of the danger of being underprepared that would benefit us, rather it would be the lesson of the fatal effects of being overprepared militarily, but rediculously outmatched economically, as was the Japanese, that might serve us best.

[Minimalist]

The point is the USN did not have 3 carriers when the Japanese attacked with 6. There were 6 US fleet carriers to match the 6 fleet carriers available to the Japanese.

How do you figure that?