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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@DG: yeah, Seigel was who I was talking about. Couldn't be arsed for the name.
Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen FryHuh, somebody at CNN needs to have their grammar license revoked
. Unless Arlan Specter spent his life going around and destroying images of politicians. (look quick before they fix it)
I don't see the problem? ...Although the mental image of Specter defacing a bust of Washington is amusing.
edited 14th Oct '12 9:14:36 PM by darksidevoid
GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.Military budgets: Part of the reason why our defense budget is as large as it is, is that we burden ourselves (or are expected to) with the ability to project significant combat force anywhere, anytime, with little notice. This requires you to have hardware on standby, so you have to buy lots of gear. It also requires you to make sure that the gear in question will work pretty much wherever, since you're expected to operate anywhere, anytime.
Then you need warm bodies to operate the equipment. Not terribly difficult, normally, but in an all-volunteer force such as our, you need to dangle a number of carrots in front of the prospective civilians so they'll sign on for four years or however long. This is why, when the Air Force is given funds to make a new base, they run out of money after making the Commisary, Post Exchange, golf courses, housing and all those other morale-boosting facilities, they have to go back and ask for money so they can put in the runways. (that was an in-service rivalry joke that the other Military tropers would get, but the fact of that joke is, we spend a LOT on making our military look enticing to young men and women.)
Then there's the logistics side of things - can you effectively airmail all that gear and warm bodies to the operational area? Or would a large troopship be better? How about you airmail just the guys and have piles of gear waiting on ships, and have the best of both worlds? Well, now we need a very robust logistical apparatus to ensure that we can carry out the mission.
But wait, there's more - if we are expected to play World Cop, that means not only do we need lots of stuff on standby and the warm bodies to use it, but we would probably be better off if we ensured that our gear and warm bodies were top-notch. Yes, you can kit out a soldier in obsolete uniforms from the Goodwill and give them a bunch of Warsaw-Pact second-rate equipment, and train them on the bare essentials of Soldiering for practically no money at all, but unless you expect them to do only defensive and/or Guerrilla-style operations, they're fodder for a professional army.
Our burden of being World Policeman (either self-given or expected by others, I'm not arguing which one it is here) thus mandates us with funding our military to do just that, whenever we need to.
That's (partly) why our military is so expensive, and the converse of those statements is why China's military is so cheap in comparison. They cannot project power like we can, so they don't have to spend as much on Logistics. Since they conscript, they don't have to pay them much. And by and large, a lot of their gear is inferior to ours, unless it's something they reverse-engineered and rebuilt - but that just means that they didn't have to invest all that R&D work into it like we did.
If we got out of playing World Policeman, our military budget could take substantial cuts. Let some other nation or nations take up the slack.
However, that endangers one other reason why our military budget is so large - jobs. It takes a lot of manpower in the Defense Contractor world to refurbish, repair and replace the gear that the troops break. If there's less need for that gear, then there's less need for the Defense Corporations to make that gear, and that leaves a lot of civilians out of work, unless they switch skill sets to making plowshares instead of swords, so to speak. This reliance on a permanent wartime economy is what President Eisenhower warned us about. It would be politically dangerous to cut back our military to a fraction of what it is today, as there's a lot of jobs on the line if that happened.
Which is sad, when you think about it.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.This is why China's budget increase for the past few years should be an alarm for the US, which Obama at least heeded (Why would Clinton be here in this side of the Pacific during the Democrats' Convention if not because of that?), but Romney is quite...quiet about China, simply because his "friends" have a lot of money invested there, while quite "noisy" against Iran, even though China is the much bigger threat.
The Chinese don't have to spend much in getting recruits because they conscript, so that's not the reason for the budget increase, they don't have to spend much in R&D because they "acquire" samples from other countries and reverse-engineer them, so that can't be the reason for the increase either, so the increase can really be attributed to increasing their logistical capabilities and trying to intimidate their neighbors.
But according to Romney Iran/Russia are the bigger threat, not China.
that's because Romney's an idiot. Russia is basically broke and Iran is a tinpot dictatorship. So they are trying to build nukes...so what? China's had nukes, and a delivery system, for quite a while now if memory serves.
@pvtnum: you are totally right. However, there's no mandate that we need to keep doing this World Cop thing, and no mandate that those dollars earmarked for Defense can't go into some other industry to create jobs.
edited 14th Oct '12 11:00:26 PM by drunkscriblerian
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~
China still has nukes...
The primary issue with allowing a country to develop their own nuclear weapons is this: The leaders of said country may not care about mutually assured destruction, and may actually want the world to burn.
Of all the countries who currently have nuclear weapons, Pakistan and North Korea are the only ones that are sketchy on that whole deal... There is no reason to allow another country to obtain such weaponry.
edited 14th Oct '12 11:24:28 PM by Swish
Regarding Iran...I'd dismiss them as meaningless if they didn't have this nasty habit of funding terrorism. It'd be pretty easy for them to hand an atomic weapon to some group that didn't like the US and say, "go, play, have fun". I think this is why no one wants them to get The Bomb.
However, the United States (and all the nations sanctioning Iran) have been building atomic weapons for half a century now. This does tend to make our moral arguments about how nuclear weapons are evil ring just an eensy bit hollow.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~Can't really argue with that. All I can say is that the currently accepted nuclear nations have had responsible track records with hydrogen bombs (and emphasis on it being hydrogen bombs, not atomic bombs), so we have to trust their judgment. There's no one to really restrain them besides each other.
@Triv: Well, yes and no. At this point we are drifting away from the topic, however. I wouldn't mind debating the politics of atomic weapons somewhere else though.
I still say Romney's an idiot for trying to cast Russia as a "Geopolitical foe", and an even bigger idiot for saying that shit in public.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~Anyone else think the obama administration's reaction to the Libya attack sounds like a coverup? People say its a planned attack, not a mere riot over someone's You Tube video.
The media was first to question whether it was planned...
But the major confusion with regards to what happened came about due to a three day period after the attack in which Obama was saying that it was a planned attack, while everyone else in his administration was saying that it was just a spur-of-the-moment riot brought about by the video...
edited 15th Oct '12 4:55:40 AM by Swish

Siegel used said chain letter, yes.