We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -Dwight D. Eisenhower

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. --Dwight David Eisenhower, (1890-1969)

So, this blog is really just the source of my random quotes for my gmail account. Unfortunately it only will take from the top 10 of the list, so I've got to do something about that... But the blog provides a feed and the feed feeds the random sig labs feature in gmail. I just turn on the labs feature and slap http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DwightsQuoteCollection?format=xml in to my feed area and voila. Still not nearly as cool as the unix randomizer which would let me pull from any of the 400 or so quotes that I have. Also, it limits quotes to one line and 96 characters. But it is better than nothing for now.

I figure if I want to make this in to a blog that has interesting content, I can do an analysis of why each quote resonated with me at the moment, why it was important to me. This one is pretty obvious. The fact that he was the president who shared a name with me, he had grave concerns about the creeping military-industrial complex (he was the one to coin that term in a farewell address to the nation in an address late in his second term), and also an examination of the security vs. freedom dilemma that we continuously have to look at in our society.

I personally feel that military spending beyond what is needed for simple defense is inherently economic opportunities lost. On the guns vs. butter debate, I fall squarely in the butter camp. The fact that the military consumes so much of our governments resources really is tragic. We could have a balanced budget simply by dismantling the military. I'd love to see a mandatory budget balancing put in where we will not ever deficit spend but where military spending must always come last. So thus if we don't have the political will to tax ourselves sufficiently, we must first take the excess from military spending.

How much are we currently spending on the military? The OMB's web site lists $481.4 billion for 2008 expenditures. The site http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm shows $1449 billion ($1.449 trillion) (they include spending on past vets and interest on the debt.) Even if you take the lower value, you still could knock off a lot of the deficit of the stimulus package. Want to have nationalized health care? That much money would more than cover the cost of it. A military sufficient to the demands of national defense (without the need to "project power in to two theaters simultaneously") would be much, much cheaper than that. Heck, all you need is enough submarines with nukes in them sufficient to wipe humanity off the planet and you'd have a deterrent against being invaded. What would that cost? Not much more than a billion or so I'd imagine. Add in a "projecting" force not small enough to invade, but large enough to contribute to joint operations and you can get away with far less than $50 billion. Canada's (18th largest military spender in the world) defense budget was $18.2 billion. Are they under threat from invasion? Right now we spend more on our military than all the rest of the countries in the world combined.

Our founding fathers (and even Eisenhower) felt that a standing military was a threat to democracy itself. Up until after WWII we had always drawn down our military size after every war, kept a small standing reserve and ramped up again when the need was present. Now there is an economic incentive for those in the military-industrial complex to continue to create war just to keep their jobs secure. So are we in these wars to keep ourselves safe or to keep some fat cats in money? Another quote (that is bigger than 96 characters) sums it up nicely:

On croit mourir pour la patrie, on meurt pour des industriels. (You believe you're dying for the country -- you die for some industrialists.)
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)