President Obama and advisors in the Oval Office pondering kill lists
A question that has repeatedly occurred to this writer is; what is it about certain people that drives them to want to build more ships and planes or otherwise build up the military when there isn't an enemy now or on the horizon capable of or desirous of challenging the U.S. militarily?
It just seems if there isn't an actual enemy to challenge us then simply invent one.
Then as to that "enemy", is it a real or imagined fear? Paranoia is an imagined fear of a threat that doesn't truly exist. But these aforementioned people aren't insane as such. And they aren't just Republicans.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut once said a couple of years ago, "We need to build two nuclear submarines a year so we don't fall behind". From here the immediate thought was, "Behind who"?
Presently, there's a "political football" being thrown about concerning the automatic cuts in defense spending that kick in this January as a part of the package the Congress initiated to cut government spending. It was a compromise the Republicans, particularly in the House had to make in order to keep the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy in place. Now there's a clamor for the lame duck Congress after the November elections to revisit the idea of defense cuts.
Historically in the U.S., whenever a war ended, the military and defense spending was cut to the bone. It even happened after W.W. II, but after the Korean War ended in 1953 and the Soviet threat having emerged and in place after they acquired the atomic bomb, the mentality changed and with it increased defense spending even without a hot war. Now it was the "cold war" with the Soviet Union used to justify the defense spending. Then with their Sputnik in 1957, Yuri Gagarin in 1961 being the first man in space and the Cuban Missile Crisis later that same year, the so called "missile gap" became the operative words calling for accelerating our need to "catch up" and the arms race was on full throttle with more and bigger bombs, ICBM's, then MIRV's became the weapons of choice until finally MAD (mutually assured destruction) was recognized and prevented us and the Soviets from contemplating any nuclear first strike, knowing the other was capable of retaliating and the "unthinkable" , nuclear annihilation, was thus averted.
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