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2012-11-05 Home Front: WoT

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Posted by Fred 2012-11-05 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [11128 views ] Top

#1 Of course it really is the less than 2% that serve their country, and the far lesser number who stay on until retirement.... who are the problem.

Multi-generational welfare, ~~Child farming,~~ Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), skyrocketing social security disabiliity, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and (WIC), Pell grants, Federal Housing Assistance, ~~UN Welfare,~~ Foreign Aid programs, ~~Gun Running~~, Foeign Military Assistance programs, paying farmers not to plant crops, Obama phones, and midnight basketball are all of lesser or no impact.

Posted by Besoeker 2012-11-05 03:09|| 2012-11-05 03:09|| Front Page Top

#2 Their ballots were lost---so, there's nothing they can do about it (Obamathink).

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2012-11-05 07:13|| 2012-11-05 07:13|| Front Page Top

#3 I've an idea. How about a $1T cut in so-called 'mandatory [but unearned] entitlements' such as welfare?

Posted by CrazyFool 2012-11-05 07:24|| 2012-11-05 07:24|| Front Page Top

#4 We don't have history, just memory and Desert One is now something in the Dark Ages. That contributed to another President's one term in office. Gut pay, gut training, gut maintenance is a known recipe for just another disaster waiting to happen.

Senator Nunn (D-GA) in the late 80s push through a reform to reduce the retired pay computation from 2.5 to 2 percent for each year served effectively reducing 20 year retirement from 50 to 40 percent of base pay. By the mid-90s retention of mid-grade NCOs and Officers had become a serious problem.

One of the major reforms of the post-Vietnam army was a turn around in treating the organization as a culture composed of humans rather than a machine with interchangeable parts. Bean counters always seem to reduce humans to throw away parts.

The present confusion in the civilian mind and the true military mind respecting the purposes of armies and limits of warfare is attributable to many circumstances. Among them, no doubt, is the character of military history as it has commonly been written. Ordinary citizens are lacking in the raw experience of combat, or deficient in technical knowledge, and inclined to leave the compilation of military records to experts in such affairs. Writers on general history have tended to neglect the broader aspects of military issues; confining themselves to accounts of campaigns and battles, handled often in a cursory fashion, they have usually written on the wars of their respective countries in order to glorify their prowess, with little or no reference to the question whether these wars were conducted in the military way of high efficiency or in the militaristic way, which wastes blood and treasure.

Even more often, in recent times, general historians have neglected military affairs and restricted their reflections to what they are pleased to call the causes and consequences of wars; or they have even omitted them altogether. This neglect may be ascribed to many sources. The first is, perhaps, a recognition of the brutal fact that the old descriptions of campaigns are actually of so little value civilian and military alike. Another has been the growing emphasis on economic and social fields deemed normal and the distaste of economic and social historians for war, which appears so disturbing to the normal course of events. Although Adam Smith included a chapter on the subject of military defense in his Wealth of Nations as a regular part of the subject, modern economists concentrate on capital, wages, interest, rent, and other features of peaceful pursuits, largely forgetting war as a phase of all economy, ancient or modern. When the mention the subject of armies and military defense, these are commonly referred to as institutions and actions which interrupt the regular balance of economic life. And the third source of indifference is the effort of pacifists and peace advocates to exclude wars and military affairs from general histories, with the view to uprooting any military or militaristic tendencies from the public mind, on the curious assumption that by ignoring realties the realties themselves will disappear.

This lack of a general fund of widely disseminated military information is perilous to the maintenance of civilian power in government. The civilian mind, presumably concerned with the maintenance of peace and the shaping of policies by the limits of efficient military defense, can derive no instruction from acrimonious disputes between militarists, limitless in their demands, and pacifists, lost in utopian visions. Where the civilians fail to comprehend and guide military policy, the true military men, distinguished from the militarists, are also imperiled. For these the executioners of civilian will, dedicated to the preparation of defense and war with the utmost regard for efficiency, are dependent upon the former.

Again, and again, the military men have seen themselves hurled into war by ambitions, passions, and blunders of civilian governments, almost wholly uninformed as to the limits of their military potentials and almost recklessly indifferent to the military requirements of the wars they let loose. Aware that they may again be thrown by civilians into an unforeseen conflict, perhaps with a foe they have not envisaged, these realistic military men find themselves unable to do anything save demand all the men, guns, and supplies they can possibly wring from the civilians, in the hope that they may be prepared or half prepared for whatever may befall them. In so doing they inevitably find themselves associated with militaristic military men who demand all they can get merely for the sake of having it without reference to ends.

Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism, rev. 1959, Free Press, NY, pp 33-34

Posted by Procopius2k 2012-11-05 08:29|| 2012-11-05 08:29|| Front Page Top

#5 What #3 crazyfool said.

Posted by JohnQC 2012-11-05 08:52|| 2012-11-05 08:52|| Front Page Top

#6 If I really thought it would help this country and our pork loving congress would do the right thing with it, I would be happy to give it all back. But then, well, a guy can dream...

Posted by 49 Pan 2012-11-05 09:16|| 2012-11-05 09:16|| Front Page Top

#7 Think you really need to do ALL of the above cuts and a bit more to avoid bankruptcy.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2012-11-05 09:47|| 2012-11-05 09:47|| Front Page Top

#8 ..of course that means responding to events rather than influencing events. It also means ending all those entangling alliances and pulling back to Fortress America cause you don't have the ability to support much beyond it. Could be done by turning the Army into a Swiss home guard reserve system along with downsizing the rest of the Defense establishment. Which of course means your defense starts at your shores rather than on other continents [aka they're in the wire before you act] surrendering the initiative, time and place to your foe.

Posted by Procopius2k 2012-11-05 10:03|| 2012-11-05 10:03|| Front Page Top

#9 P2k, I'm afraid its an energy function.
If the walls are pulled in to Fortress America, I think we will see escalated social engagements (gangs/police, kidnappings, home invasion/home defense, drug users/drug providers, etc.) more frequently as the energy cycles within the closer walls(same amount of energy in a smaller space). This will generate more self-defending clusters(citizen patrolled neighborhoods) and eventually the mobile will migrate out of the cities to the 'lesser spaces', mostly bringing their troubles with them.
That's the next generation's problem I think as the institution of centralized government/feed trough decays.

Posted by Skidmark 2012-11-05 10:32|| 2012-11-05 10:32|| Front Page Top

#10 and eventually the mobile will migrate out of the cities to the 'lesser spaces', mostly bringing their troubles with them. Skid

..."troubles", ie, crime, drugs, tribal politics, bad debt, failed lending institutions, foreclosures, poor schools, hate filled pulpits, etc, etc. Welcome to the new neighborhood.

Posted by Besoeker 2012-11-05 10:44|| 2012-11-05 10:44|| Front Page Top

#11 "Welcome to the new neighborhood."

Besoeker ... it's definitely coming. To be honest, I am surprised that US crime rates have stayed as low as they have. I attribute that to spiralling payments in the welfare and food stamp rpograms. At some point those programs will be seriously cut - and when that happens we will see "mean streets" return to America.

Posted by Raider 2012-11-05 12:28|| 2012-11-05 12:28|| Front Page Top

#12 Jersey City is reportedly on lockdown following last night's break-ins. Nothing on FOX yet, except a fire.

Posted by Besoeker 2012-11-05 12:31|| 2012-11-05 12:31|| Front Page Top

#13 "Center for American Progress"

Isn't that funded by Soros? Cui bono?

Posted by Barbara 2012-11-05 13:41|| 2012-11-05 13:41|| Front Page Top

#14 And old story, unfortunately

Posted by James 2012-11-05 21:09|| http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com 2012-11-05 21:09|| Front Page Top

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