Damn straight! My gal Lizzie, whom I confess has received more thumbs down than thumbs up from me in the past, holds the sad distinction of being the only Democrat—and thus of course the only member—of the Senate Armed Services Committee not to vote to boost the Biden administration’s already massively bloated defense budget from $715 billion to $740 billion, a budget that I will conservatively estimate to be about $340 billion more than “necessary”. Politico’s Conor O’Brien fills us in on the sad details—Senate Democrats defied Biden in their vote to boost Pentagon spending. And it wasn't even close.
When I think of the keystrokes I’ve expended bemoaning our abysmally overlarge1 defense budget, my fingers ache, because that number, I would say, is also about 740 billion. Instant karma is really biting my ass.
Afterwords
For more howls and groans regarding our ludicrously out of control defense budget, which goes very largely not to defend us, but to spend money as an end in itself, go here. What’s really, uh, “killing” about our out of control budget is that, since our military leaders know that modern warfare has grown so destructive that there is no conceivable reason why any major power would attack another,2 we can safely waste hundreds of billions of dollars on dysfunctional weapon systems that don’t work, that exist for no purpose other than to spend money, like the F-35 “Flying Turkey”, or the B-21 “bomber”, which, I confidently predict, will lay far more eggs than ordnance, or the U.S. Navy’s $7 billion Zumwalt-class destroyers,, which can barely float. as well as its “Littoral Combat Ship”, armed with the (presumably) deadly “Griffin” missile, delivering a 13-pound warhead with a full 5-mile range. When I was in Vietnam in 1969, our howitzer delivered a 33-pound shell with a range of 11 miles. Guess they forgot how to make those.
1. “Overlarge” is a word. Didn’t really see that coming.
2. Four-star Marine general Anthony Zinni, who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1965, experiencing really the “second half” of the Cold War, summed up the endless prepping for the “Big One” this way: “Problem was, we could never figure just how this particular war would actually start. After playing a bazillion war games at the Naval War College and other places, I still could not come up with a logical or convincing way such a war would kick off. It was just too hard to show why the Soviets would want to conquer a burning, devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over the way the miserable war got started, jump into the middle of things, and play on. The Cold War was ever-present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems, and force structure—but, deep down inside, no one seriously believed that it would actually happen.” (Battle Ready, by Zinni and Tom Clancy)
