« Take Decisive Action on Debt Ceiling! Just Do it, Barack! (Financial Times Deutschland, Germany)
President Obama says Agreement has been Reached to Reduce Deficit, Avoid Default, and Boost Ecomony »
A good place to start
Want to cut spending? A good way to start would be to end The Global War On Terror:
Ground the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. Rethink the idea of spending billions of dollars to pursue al-Qaida. Forget chasing terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, unless the local governments are willing to join in the hunt.
Those aren’t the words of some human rights activist, or some far-left Congressman. They’re from retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — the man who was, until recently, nominally in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.
Starting with the drone attacks. Yes, they take out some mid-level terrorists, Blair said. But they’re not strategically effective. If the drones stopped flying tomorrow, Blair told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum, “it’s not going to lower the threat to the U.S.” Al-Qaida and its allies have proven “it can sustain its level of resistance to an air-only campaign,” he said.
There is more at the link and a video. Blair closes with this:
Yet al-Qaida and its affiliates only have about 4,000 members worldwide. That’s $20 million per terrorist per year, Blair pointed out.
“You think — woah, $20 million. Is that proportionate?” he asked. “So I think we need to relook at the strategy to get the money in the right places.”
Blair mentioned that 17 Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by terrorists since 9/11 — 14 of them in the Ft. Hood massacre. Meanwhile, auto accidents, murders and rapes combine have killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the past decade. “What is it that justifies this amount of money on this narrow problem?” he asked.
Via my Partner Steve at Newshoggers.
6 Responses to “A good place to start”
Ending the war on drugs will save the country a few more Billions every year.
The best place to start is where the biggest problem is and where the most and earliest action is most needed, entitlements. But the military, yes, needs to rationalized.
Ending the Drug War would reduce all kinds of costs, though I wouldn’t stop there but (Dems mainly would agree) seek good criminal justice and corrections reform.
DLS
I think you should include the GWOT as an entitlement because that’s what it is – corporate welfare for the defense industry. The best case is it’s not making the US any safer.
I wouldn’t, Ron — that’s just an analogy or an equivocation, depending on how much substance it actually has. As I said, procurement reform is a real biggie with the military, and so is reducing our overseas commitments, and eventually our personnel and their present and future costs.
That flies in the face of liberal Democrats who want everyone conscripted, so the wealthy have their family members, too, at risk, and those who have discussed universal participation or effective conscription, say from ages 18-21. (I’ve been among those who have described that idea as a concept. Now I presume that the military all older youth would form would be used in military roles, including securing our neglected borders, rather than wrongly be social workers, additions to police forces, or pure PR nonsense actors.)
But we can’t afford a super- (greater than) necessary military in our future as we age and other priorities happen as well as that we face other economic problems in the future (which will be one of a number of reasons all our governments will shrink, too).
That’s not only procurement and personnel and foreign actions, but with on-going or repeated things, and contracts for these things.
Don’t worry; it’ll get shrunk like everything else, Ron.
Citizens lose rights over time. The war on terror has taken rights, so it is, by default, irreversible. Same with the war on drugs.
I agree with you Mr. Beasley and thanks for posing these sources.