Obama’s Showdown Over Nukes

As one of the few people on this site able to elucidate in detail why the M16A1 was a step back from the M14, and why 45. ACP is infinitely superior to 9mm, I am going to now take it upon myself to tell all of you the problem with military appropriations.  Reading the above article will work just as well, but the more I write, the more times my name appearing in a Google search.  The US military bugdet currently exceeds $585 billion dollars.  That is more than every other country in the world…combined.  Yet the mighty US war machine seems to constantly run afoul of teenagers in jeans with the finest Russian military gear from 1956.  While there are sundry causes for this much of it has to do with a Department of Defense dedicated to funding only projects that a Bond villain might question the soundness of.  These new nukes will likely be expensive, redundant, unnecessary.  With many thousands of nukes sitting in subs, silos, and bunkers, the US has probability on its side that the nuked target will in fact become a memory, yet the US military insists on pissing off the rest of the world by putting out new models.

Now I have no problem making sure that the US army is the finest fighting machine yet seen on the face of the earth, because lord knows the rest of the world does not seem too eager to step up and fight genocidal maniacs, but we should at least do so cleverly.  The US armed forces have wasted tax dollars on everything from rifles that don’t fire (M16, M4) to planes that don’t land (V 22 Osprey), to boats that don’t float (San Antonio class cruisers).  Since more than half of all federal spending goes toward these stokes of genius, President Obama’s most important fiscal charge may well be reining in a government body that has forgotten what the word “no” means.

-Sam Bieler