So, it appears that The Big Joke (read our current non-president), has released a wish-list budget outline. In it are funding slashes for every government program that does any good, and an increase in only one government program - military spending. In his words, he wants to "rebuild our military."
Now, the U.S. already spends more on its military than the next 8 nations combined. China, the second-largest military, spends roughly one third of what America does, and Russia one sixth. If we want to improve our military, the solution is not additional spending, but rather cutting the waste of what we spend now.
Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, and he was eerily prophetic. Congressmen who want to create jobs in their district have always blindly approved appropriations for government contracts to build more planes we don't need, more tanks we will never use, and more jarheads that we will never deploy. The problem with our military isn't the amount of money we're spending. It's that our military is a fat, bloated, inefficient sauropod. And what's worse, it's obsolete.
The old saying goes that generals spend decades preparing for the previous war, and that's true with America's military. The next war will not be fought with planes, bombs and aircraft carriers. These things have their place, but there's a new front which has opened up. The age of nuclear weapons has imposed an uneasy truce among all nations when it comes to conventional warfare. Instead, wars are reduced to third-world skirmishes and Islamic turf-wars. But there's a new kind of warfare now, and the next true war will be fought in this way. I am speaking, of course, of cyber warfare.
This past election might have been the first battle fought on that front. And guess what? We lost! Our asses got kicked by Russia, a nation with an economy roughly half the size of France. We are woefully unprepared to deal with the realities of a tech war, and we are vulnerable. Truly vulnerable!
It is useless to build more missiles when hackers could potentially turn those additional missiles against us! What our military needs now is not more nuts and bolts - we're just fine there! What it needs are more cyber warriors! It needs the best hackers and counter-hackers that are trainable! And it needs them to protect not just military assets, but civilian ones as well. There needs to be a fifth branch of the service launched. Perhaps we can call it the Cyber Corps. And its mission must be to protect our power grids, our data systems, even our elections from outside cyber attack. Right now. Because at the moment, if an enemy wants to attack us, that's where to do it. The soft underbelly of our nation lies in its over-dependence upon technology which it only barely knows how to use.
How do we achieve getting the best hackers? There is only one way: education, education, education! Because the best hackers are also the best programmers, and the best programmers are the best students in math and science. We need to not only have an entire branch of the military devoted to cyber warfare, we need the personnel to staff it. And we cannot get that by slashing education funding or farting around with voucher programs that have been proven not to work in the field.
The biggest threat to our national security is Betsy DeVos!
Besides, if we really want to increase military spending, we could better do so by supporting the veterans of the wars we've already fought. We could actually fund our military hospitals and hire more doctors and nurses to care for our soldiers. We could clear the backlog of veterans waiting for medical services. We could train them for new occupations after they get home so that they are not unemployed after they set the uniform aside.
So let's rally around this theme: Less hardware! More cyber personnel! Because this is one area of over-bloated government spending where we really could get a lot more done for a lot less cash!
Eric
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