Everything looks like a nail. Nicholas Kristof has a great piece in The New York Times regarding the bloated and often counter-productive investments we continue to make in the military, when spending in other areas could make us safer.
The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.
Kristof cites two career military men of note — President Dwight Eisenhower and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates — to support his thesis. And sorry Raytheon, this means you too — we can’t seem to capture Osama with any of this stuff. And maybe now we can get the linguists back into the intelligence community and find out what the threats to our security might actually be.
Bill Maher is a huge favorite of mine. He’s been on this one for a long time.
Didn’t read the Kristof piece, but the description reminds me of Bill Mahr’s book “When you ride alone, you ride with Bin Laden”. I don’t agree with everything he says, but Mahr makes some great points about wasteful spending and wrong priorities in the so-called war on terror. Like the picture with this story too. Dr. Strangelove is a classic.