There's a machine in Washington and he is giving them what they want. In his mind, it's just good business, even though literally millions of people could die because of it.

Pay them defense contractors, build the wall; cuts to education, housing, environment, energy, diplomacy, and anything that smells foreign or liberal. Sounds like Trump all over. His base will eat it up.

millions of people could die because of it. This is ludicrous.

What percentage of our military force is currently idle: pretty much zero.

the occasional training exercise

what you don't understand about the military is impressive manwe

what 'millions'?

on one hand trump talks of disbanding nato and reducing our presence in europe. people go nuts. north korea launches missiles. people go nuts. russia overruns other countries and the US does not respond. people go nuts. ISIS runs rampant and syria is collapsing, calls for american involvement. people go nuts.

so what will it be. disengage and bring everyone home and roll up the drawbridge?

of course ogion would say that is military fetishism

It's my knowledge of the military actually that enables me to be so frustrated by this. The U.S. has over 4,000 nuclear missile, 8000 tanks, 40,000 armored fighting vehicles, 13,000 aircraft, and 100 various naval vehicles, and 2.5 million active personnel. To put that last figure into perspective, we have about 10,000 soldiers fighting in Afghanistan right now, and that is the only country we are fighting a war in right now. If we utilize our vehicular firepower at the same rate as our human power, we are atrociously inefficient. And do we really need enough nuclear missiles to nuke every country in the world 20 times over? I'm all for destroying Isis, but increasing the size of the military is NOT going to help accomplish that. If there is a direction that military spending needs to be moving, it's downward.

Inb4 the amount of grammatical errors in my post is atrocious too.

Not that I wholly disagree, but there's a saying about how many men it takes to support one at the tip of the spear.

Also, in what inexplicably hasn't been a topic of much discussion round here, the US military has ground troops in Syria.

"Also, in what inexplicably hasn't been a topic of much discussion round here, the US military has ground troops in Syria."

True, but that is an amount in the hundreds or fewer. And we aren't really at war there, only conducting special operations like we do in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. from time to time.

Actually the plan is to increase that by a thousand who will be operating artillery and the like. They'll say they aren't "in combat" even as the body bags pile up

Well, it'll bring down the deficit to gut the EPA because you get big savings on social security when people die by the tens of thousands for lack of health care and due to air pollution. Literally the scoring on the health care plan includes billions in social security savings from the 30,000 or so premature deaths Trumpcare is expected to cause. Add in many thousand more from gutting the EPA and those are big savings. Want to see a death panel? Look at the Republicans in Congress and the White House

Manse, you talk of numbers but I know the tempo of operations. Ever wonder how the police can patrol for twenty-four hours? It takes three people to cover one patrol. Now imagine the military. The navy covers three oceans and two major seas. It maintains an aircraft carrier in the med, the Indian ocean and the western pacific. There are only nine in service, sometimes less if two are being overhauled. So that means you need three carriers for each position to cover four months of being 'on station'. Now you might say oh just leave them home and sail them when there is trouble. But it takes almost a month to get to the station. If we need to go across the sea we would not be there in a timely manner. Now imagine the sailors gone from home six months of every eighteen. That does not include the time to train for deployment which means more time from home. After awhile you get tired of being away from home. It is very stressful and most military leave after one enlistment. That means needing to constantly train new people. And on and on. So unless we just completely disengage from the world the military needs to be large. So what we are talking about is the political will to withdrawal.

That is 30,000 deaths ANNUALLY. That is ten 9/11s every single year. The GOP is plotting to kill Americans at a rate al Qaeda could only dream of

http://time.com/4219575/air-pollution-deaths/

i think it's 80,000

Brad, you already admitted (in a different thread) that America could cut a little military. I applauded you for that admission and am a little disappointed that you seem to be backsliding. America spends as much as the next 6, 7, or 8 countries combined. Either we spend inefficiently or we are WAY stronger than everyone else. It has GOT to be one or the other. The choice here IS binary.

I'll bet that foreign aid programs get smashed, despite their effectiveness, and also despite the fact that a lot of foreign aid money is spent having "domestic" service providers deliver the aid, so there is often a big benefit to the donor country with most foreign aid programs

If you are talking capability you are correct. We are the eight hundred pound gorilla. However, in order to do the cuts I said previously we would have to back off on treaty commitments and retreat from our forward deployments. We would become like the fire department as opposed to the police department. There is quite a difference.

I believe the situation is more akin to us killing a fly with a tomahawk missile right now. We could provide the optimal level of security with a drastically reduced military, you only need a flyswatter for that fly.

So we're the world's policeman now? Protecting what, American business interests? That makes American business the true "welfare queens". They need to pay their own way, not tax me for a military so they can earn their corporate profits abroad.

I believe you are wrong. The analogy is whether you want to wait for the police to arrive in three minutes or three days

Yep. Foreign aid, education, renewable energy all contribute more to national security than the military dollar for dollar. This increase in military spending is just pissing down a rat hole. Too bad we can't spend that money on something that contributes to society

You'll never convince me we need 4,000 nuclear missiles in order to deter anyone from attacking us. You can accomplish the same objective with far less. Same goes for the number of almost every type of vehicle we have. China is not going to feel any more confident in fighting us because we have 10,000 armored fighting vehicles on standby rather than 40,000.

Brad, you need to address why we are the policeman at all. (Ideally, both firemen and policemen arrive quickly). That federal spending abroad benefits corporations much more than it does the homeland.

Wake up hauta. We have been the worlds policeman since 1945. People here have complained when trump proposed tariffs on imported goods. What if you could not import anything because the place you would buy it was overrun by another unfriendly country or the sea routes were blocked. Look up,the straits of hormuz and the Singapore strait. Any idiot with a machine gun can block those things. The world's economy still runs on middle east oil. And see what countries near by want to control their use.

Hauta do you drive a domestic or foreign car? Or do you have a car at all?

Manwe, most of the spending goes to personnel. The mone for those military hardware items have already been spent.