(July 19, 2018 at 2:14 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:Broken down fighter jets and tanks weaken the alliance, more than internal funding debates.
It is our military readiness that is in question, not NATO's. The reason for this is actually quite simple. We keep flying our planes into the ground and deploying soldiers and equipment to pointless "wars"! The rest of NATO largely avoids that little bit of stupidity.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2017...aders.html
Quote:Only three of the Army's 58 Brigade Combat Teams are ready to fight; 53 percent of Navy aircraft can't fly; the Air Force is 723 fighter pilots short; and the Marine Corps needs 3,000 more troops.
"We're just flat-out out of money" to address those immediate needs and provide the additional personnel and maintenance funding to plan for the future, Navy Adm. William Moran said Tuesday in summing up the concerns of four-star officers across the services.
And of course, the Pentagon's answer to everything is "give us more money." No matter how much they get it is never enough. In that, they are much like churches.
Um actually, if memory serves me correctly, more often than not, the Pentagon for decades has been saying, we have a surplus of weapons we never use.
The issue for me isn't spending money on our military, but we still need to be selective in doing that. We also have to keep in mind that weapons companies whom make tanks and jets and any weapon, is a GLOBAL industry. Just like the NRA, sell fear, scare the shit out of everyone, just like Daffy pitting Foghorn against the Beagle, you your weapons company increases profits.
I'd say provide more money for intel and cyber security and ally support. But we should not simply blindly expand and all our spending should be case by case and by need only.
Ony the GOP is claiming we should give the Pentagon more money blindly. The GOP are full of warmongers. Cheney and Haliburton is a prime example of using ideology to justify cronie capitalism.
This is the same GOP that has obstructed Vet's bills funding their health care and want to blindly privatize it for profit. So for decades they have gut funding to the VA then blame dems for a problem they caused.
The long term problem has been Reagan starting the age of deregulation. If we as a nation need something, we SHOULD fund it, but if we don't need it we need to stand up to the corporations and tell them to fuck off.
