This is the second article that you have written on defense spending in the last few weeks. I agree with your argument that we need to invest more in the troops. You wrote: “That’s why the Army has been trying to develop an advanced electronic network for soldiers and new combat vehicles that can accommodate this network.”

That said, I disagree with the premise that we need a “defense stimulus.” I don’t see how any reasonable person can argue for a bigger increase in defense spending when we already spend 600B+ on defense, especially when the GOP is screaming about fiscal responsibility. More specifically, except for those directly tied to the defense contractors, very few people would support weapon systems like the F22. Even John McCain wouldn’t support it. With 600B+, the Pentagon still has all of the money to buy all of the weapons and material it needs for the wars. It just have to make better decisions and stop wanting the sky.

There was an article in the NYT this morning, showing a picture of Sec. Gates observing the Army’s new anti-mine vehicle. We need more of those and other equipments for the troops, such as a better mine-sweeper. We are still using the same mine-sweeper that was used in Vietnam!

It also occurs to me that in a conflict like Afghanistan, high-tech equipments are not the determining factors. As soon as we roll out the latest and greatest equipment, the opponent will come up with a way to destroy it. For example, the latest Marine armor vehicle can be destroyed with the large anti-tank mines. In the end, “human factors” such as cultural understanding, tribal politics, etc., will determine the result, and that is something that defense money cannot buy.

Dulles had advocated trying to “roll back” Soviet Communism by using the threat of nuclear weapons if they didn’t. (Dulles’ doctrine of Massive Retaliation included the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a non-nuclear demarche by the Soviet bloc.) That would not only have failed to stop the USSR, it would have very likely touched off a regional nuclear war eventually.

Three things made the collapse of the USSR possible in the 1980s that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1950s:

1. The West was far outstripping the USSR in micro-electronics. Electronic countermeasures, stealth, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, would simply have been impossible in the 1950s.

2. The only thing the USSR had to sell abroad was raw materials. The fourth “hero” of the Cold War was Volcker. Reagan AND Volcker ended double-digit inflation in the West. That caused the prices of the USSR’s commodities to plummet, leaving them facing bankruptcy.

3. A rise of new Soviet leaders (e.g. Gorbachev) who were too young to remember World War II, and who were willing to try reforms.

In short, Eisenhower made the most of the global situation he had. By 1980, the global situation had changed dramatically.

And today, in 2009, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System is far more valuable to the U.S. than the manned space program has been. I drive on Interstate highways every week.

rbottoms is going to take whatever is said by his opponents here and twist the words into pretzels that don’t match reality or the intent of the speaker. He did it so often on so many conservative sites just this year that he’s been kicked off more sites than I even read. It’s amazing. What drives these trolls? Anger? Jealousy? A lack of connection with their own kind? Love of drama –any drama– even artifically created drama with an anonymous person? It’s really pathetic. Like someone else said here lately: bottoms is here to inflame, incite and irritate. That’s all. For him, it’s sport.

i thought you were put away nicely with all those straw man arguments here:

“rbottoms, the far Left troll who has been bounced off more GOP and conservative and moderate sites than even our Village Idiot, AutomaticBS, says: “Yeah, building a replacement for the president’s helicopter is a vital national imperative.” I thinking you’d be better off using that straw-man for sipping your milk at lunchtime, rbottoms. -mi-gop @ 8

but you keep dragging them out like a queer from the drama closet. can you please give it a rest drama boy and keep your straw men in the closet for once?
“

good question –maybe a refresher course on margaret thatcher, pope john paul and ronnie reagan might help you answer it, troll. of course, they did it without launching a single nuclear weapon… keep the strangelove in your pants, bub.

well thank you very much for trying to shove those words into my mouth, sinz54… i didn’t say dulles was a dove and I didn’t say eisenhower was a dove either. that’s your selective spinning at full tilt; you want to do that with the vast array of trolls here -go to it. you want to try it with me, no go. better yet, try putting your own words in your own mouth… it’s a better fit.

recap with me, if you can?

1) reason60 quoted eisenhower as some great sage in his legendary warning of the military industrial establishment on exiting office. eisenhower’s granddaughter is fond to point out that granddad ike was trying hard to create a legacy where, in ike’s mind, no legacy existed of his two bored-to-tears terms as a lackluster president. l-e-g-a-c-y. great geo washington like exit speech should nail it for ol’ ike, eh? well, at least for a generation of liberals it sure has.

2) then i noted to reason60’s repeat of about the only famous thing that ike ever said… that ike also thought the future was in road building vast expressways across america –killing more farmland, more habitats, more ancient animal mitgration pathways than who knows what– and not in exploring space, going to the moon, astrophysics. use them highways to land transport planes in case the ruskkies attack! yeah, great planning that ike.

3) i said that ike didn’t do too much as president and he actually left millions of people behind the iron curtain, harnessed to the great communist empires of his day. he did it as supreme commander of europe. he continued to accomodate communist dictatorships throughout his presidency. he thought containment, not liberation, was the answer. ike’s famous quote ends with a reference to hoisting america onto an iron cross –rhetoric that seems ironic given that he personally was responsible for leaving millions of people on the iron cross of communism.

4) then you come back with a pure, pulled-out-of-your-ass, made-up accusation that i called dulles and ike doves. wrong. put words in your own mouth for a change and leave the cheap debate tricks for the trolls, ok?

ike would have been a far better president if he had listened more to dulles. but you see, the problem with generals is that they expect the civvies to follow them like soldiers. ike was the right man for europe. he’d have made a better democrat candidate for president –something he flirted with and mamie advised him to pursue but events intervened for him to follow the republican course to the white house.

take a look sometime at stephen ambrose’s book on ike and the relationship with the dulles boys. it might help you make some sense out of history instead of reaching the wrong conclusions and infecting others with your misprisioned readings.

and stop putting your words into my mouth. i write what i want and i say what i mean. you could learn from that.

Spending $500 million on a squad of $100,000 drones flown out of Nevada put the rest to use repairing every road and bridge of importance in America is a horrible waste of resources.

China certainly isn’t going to take us on in dogfights in the skies over Taiwan. They will send 100,000 hackers and a few EMP optimized suitcase nukes at us to crash our financial infrastructure. One Fy-22 or 1,000 won’t stop that or protect us.

Spending a few hundred billion upgrading and hardening out electrical grid and moving out communications to secure wireless 5G networks available anywhere from coast to coast will.

Hell, even Al Queada is capable of mounting the first part of the attack through a DoS spread across the planet courtesy of North Korea’s military. And it doesn’t take a suitcase nuke to shutdown all the major bridges of our big cities for a few weeks. Dynamite and some stolen radium will do that.

It won’t be airliners into the Sears Tower next time. It will Cessna’s into Chlorine tanks at water treatment facilities.

Stop fighting the last war. Harden what can be hit by one man with a stick of dynamite or a hand grenade. That’s the lesson of Major Hasan.

And without tring to completely hijack this thread re: “I Like Ike”, I will agree with him that in the great scheme of national priorities, he was correct that a moon landing should be less important than a good infrastructure, affodable housing, and a sound economy. And in fairness to Kennedy, we had those things (for the most part) at the time he proposed it.

And getting back to the topic, even if defense spending seems like a crowd-pleaser, that doesn’t make it good policy.
Coming up with a realistic plan to balance the budget may not make hearts go pitter pat at Fox News but it is a more principled and courageous stance than “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”
Right now, even if we had a Palin/Jindal Administration, and Speaker of the House Bachmann, what would they do?
Every policy I have heard is based on a tissue of platitudes (Fiscal conservatism”), unrealistic expectations (A return to morality) , and monstrously irresponsible goals (War with Iran/ Pakistan/Yemen/ Venezuela/ Enemy to be named later).

To paraphrase the thread, “A bumpersticker is not a platform”

Saying that we need to keep everything we have, and add more on top of it, is unrealistic. Might as well be saying no.