shorter gates: fight “root causes” …

Im telling that I didn’t write it.

Hey – big military, government and business has thier own language.

So do conservatives and progressives, that is just the way that it is.

We found out in Iraq that when we paid the pool of unworking people, they came to our side.

Now, we tried to do this early on by doing public projects, but, it was not fast enough, the money did not get in the hands o stop them from contemplating how bad they had it and it must be our fault. We needed to put more emphasis in the discontent by simply getting them money to live on!

i guess i’m a hippie – but not dirty

is that what you call a Hippie – learn from the past and change? mmmm

I read it, and it sounds more like “give us more money” than anything else.

“Support for conventional modernization programs is deeply embedded in the Defense Department’s budget, in its bureaucracy, in the defense industry, and in Congress. My fundamental concern is that there is not commensurate institutional support — including in the Pentagon — for the capabilities needed to win today’s wars and some of their likely successors.”

The words used throughout mean “commensurate”, not “alternative”, “also” not “instead”. Gates explicitly backs FCS, the future bomber, the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and missile defense. All massive boondoggles. Then he wants extra for nation building, proxy group building (what, like the MeK?), cyberwarfare etc etc.

He says, without naming names, that Pakistan is the biggest threat because it’s already a rogue/failed state with nukes and then goes on to repeat the usual BS, repeated by Obama too, about Iran actively seeking nukes too – something unsupported by the last NIE or current IAEA findings.

Gates looks back at “two generations of constant military engagement” in “Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more” and doesn’t see anything inherently wrong in that – only the procurement strategy for another two decades of the same. He even quotes a neocon godfather in his last graph:

In world affairs, “what seems to work best,” the historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, “. . . is the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose.”

No, that doesn’t sound like a DFH to me.

Regards, C

Well, of all the government agencies that there are

to me military is number one and it takes money to do it, lots and lots of it.

Yes – it wastes money, by definition, government does things poorly and for too much money, that is how government works

Maybe you want to sub out the military – maybe import it from the chinese?