Yet more good news from the defense front.
They cannibalize spare B61s for parts, such as the vacuum tubes needed to keep the radars working on active bombs. If they don’t have spares, they track down outdated machines to manufacture the components themselves, as they did when they bought a machine to produce integrated circuits.
What’s that again on deep defense cuts? And after seeing some of the images on the news, you think we might need these things in working condition??
It is the stated goal of the Obama Administration to drastically cut, then dispense with, America’s nuclear arsenal.
Showing one’s throat to the wolf is a hell of a National Security Strategy, innit?
I remember Obama making unilateral disarmament statements in 2008, or at any rate before His Assumption. The article itself says that his administration continues to support maintaining and sustaining the nuclear arsenal. Either cooler heads have prevailed, or the right hand hasn’t received the memo from the left hand yet. In any case I remain skeptical. Mind you it would be nice to find out that he’d actually changed his mind after a session with the SecDef or something.
Meh. I say let them go. Looks like they’re too old and too expensive to maintain and, in the case of a general nuclear exchange, these would be the least likely to ever even reach their targets.
But what about something short of a general nuclear exchange? Plenty of places and scenarios where these are damned useful.
Problem is, Obama has pledged our nuclear disarmament. While a number of our avowed enemies build theirs.
National Security Strategy. Great plan.
The decline of our military seems, to me, to be completely inevitable, given that our government’s tax base keeps diminishing. Let’s say we do what a lot of people want, and completely shunt all government money out of services, education, welfare, and so forth, and put it into the military. I believe that all evidence points to these kind of social programs bringing a net economic return rather than being a net economic drain. So I don’t see how it will help more than temporarily, and it will hurt in the long run. It seems obvious to me that we will continue to lose tax base as long as our nation’s wealth continues to become ever more concentrated into the hands of a few individuals, who just don’t buy as much stuff as hundreds of millions of people do with the same money. These enormously rich people are also paying much lower tax rates than the middle class, and they have the resources to move their wealth to overseas tax havens. It doesn’t help that we keep moving our economic generation over to our biggest competitor, China. Logically, allowing the extremely rich to pay less tax, while allowing them to corner ever more of the nation’s wealth, results in continuing loss of tax base, and clearly, forces us to lose military power over time. If we want our military power to grow, we clearly need to address this as our top security problem, rather than continuing to throw billions away battling pitiful handfuls of ragheads in poor countries and useless security measures for airlines. Throw those billions at erasing overseas tax havens, keeping industry and manufacturing in the U.S., and cracking down on deadbeat billionaires could save our country, for those who actually care about our country, rather than the interests of a handful of plutocratic scumbags who don’t care about us, our lands, our freedoms, or our families.
Interesting comments. So, what do we do next?
Agreed. How, praytell, shall we make American industry competitive with the developing world? Doing away with labor unions and the EPA probably won’t cut it.
Those B61′s look like they might be just the right size to be used on one reclatricant city, or for an upper atmosphere EMP effect over a major city somewhere. The fact that they can be mounted on multiple platforms for delivery makes them pretty useful as well.