I love all this talk about how the soviets were defeated by the reagan era us arms buildup. hogwash. It really didn't matter, in the sense that the soviets still possessed an entirely effective deterrent against US aggression, regardless of the theoretical disparities involved. Each party possessed 30-40K deliverable nuclear weapons at the time. Even in a first strike 95% success scenario, the US would have been rendered into shambles by their retaliation. They didn't have to keep up, and they knew it. It's the functional difference between "I kill you a hundred times over!" and "I kill you once"... which is to say no difference at all.
Military spending, then and now, is largely pork, and very dangerous pork, at that. the problem with having a big gun laying around is that sooner or later some damned fool will just have to shoot it, which is what the Neocons said they wanted to do even before GWB laid out his stay at home foreign policy flimflam...
And the whole bit about Obama not going to Iraq, not meeting with Petraeus, or with a veterans group trying to set him up is just another flimflam. Meet with Petraeus? Why? He's bush's guy, meaning that neither has anything to gain from it. go to Iraq? Why? Self-aggrandizement? create war friendly propaganda? That's obviously why McCain went... Meet with a veterans group set up and financed by your political opponents? Why? Were they there to urge him to vote for the pending veterans benefits bill? probably not... Not that they actually tried to set up a meeting, just showed up unannounced as a publicity stunt...
Military spending, then and now, is largely pork, and very dangerous pork, at that. the problem with having a big gun laying around is that sooner or later some damned fool will just have to shoot it, which is what the Neocons said they wanted to do even before GWB laid out his stay at home foreign policy flimflam...
And the whole bit about Obama not going to Iraq, not meeting with Petraeus, or with a veterans group trying to set him up is just another flimflam. Meet with Petraeus? Why? He's bush's guy, meaning that neither has anything to gain from it. go to Iraq? Why? Self-aggrandizement? create war friendly propaganda? That's obviously why McCain went... Meet with a veterans group set up and financed by your political opponents? Why? Were they there to urge him to vote for the pending veterans benefits bill? probably not... Not that they actually tried to set up a meeting, just showed up unannounced as a publicity stunt...