Defense and the National Interest

Chuck Spinney
10 December 2008
My good friend Pierre Sprey forwarded this amazing quote by Vice Admiral Bill Gortney. Pierre’s comments are in BLUE and Vice Adm Gortney’s comments are in italics. My comments follow and are so marked.
An utterly convincing testimonial, from an expert witness with flawless credentials, regarding the benefits of quality over quantity for [...]

Now available from the publisher, the Center for Defense Information.
Click here (2.6 MB PDF).
[Click on image for a larger view]

lots of other stuff, including defense, joins in.  Rob Paterson has a detailed look at this issue, along with an extensive review of America’s Defense Meltdown, on his blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
What America does confront are “people’s wars”. Our “enemies” are not states at all. Aircraft carriers are impotent when facing a guerrilla movement. So are [...]

For the occasional visitor to DNI who isn’t also reading Fabius Maximus, I suggest a quick trip over to “The Last Opportunity for Effective Action Before Disaster Strikes.” As he points out, the government has tried at least 15 initiatives to contain the escalating financial crisis since it began in December 2006. You [...]

By William S. Lind
June 16, 2008
Improbably, an opportunity has arisen in Iraq for the U.S. to attain two of its most important goals, namely obtaining some legitimacy for the al-Maliki “government” and getting American troops out. This could be the last international express leaving Baghdad Central Station, and we should be on it.

Former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts is his usual cheery self over at CounterPunch. According to numbers recently issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The government is now the largest single sector of employment in the country, passing manufacturing and even the services industries
Imports exceed the total value of manufactured goods (not just [...]

Seydlitz89 raised an interesting point in a comment to a my post, The Future of Conflict:
From a Clausewitzian perspective, specific political interests/objective politics runs what passes for US policy today, what Max Weber would have called political or adventure capitalism. Also the character of the state defines the character of its policies. Thus reducing the [...]

The FY2009 DoD budget proposal calls for increases ranging from 100% to 400% in TRICARE (the military medical program for active duty and retirees) pharmacy fees, moving TRICARE in a single step from one of the best drug benefit programs to one that is decidedly second rate.

That’s how former OMB official Gordon Adams described congressional proposals to mandate annual spending of 4% of GDP on the DoD baseline (i.e., not including Iraq, Afghanistan, and certain programs related to national defense but funded in other departments). This would raise the baseline from the $515 BN in the FY 2009 budget request [...]

Download a a short PowerPoint presentation (444 KB) highlighting some of the themes from my new book, If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration. [The book is now available on Amazon.]