EVERY KID ONCE THEY TURN 18, GIRLS AND BOYS, MUST SPEND 2 OR 3 YEARS IN THE MILITARY.. THAT’S RIGHT I SAID IT, BRING BACK SOMETHING STRONGER THAN THE DRAFT…

KIDS IN THIS COUNTRY ARE SPOILED ROTTEN AND WANT EVERYTHING HANDED TO THEM.. THEY EXPECT MOMMY AND DADDY TO DO EVERY THING FOR THEM..

I KNOW BECAUSE I WAS ONE OF THEM AND ALL MY FRIENDS STILL ARE.. UP UNTIL 9–11-01 WHEN I JOINED THE MILITARY I THOUGHT I WAS ENTITLED TO EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THE FREEDOM I BREATHE EVERY DAY..
NOW I KNOW FREEDOM IS NOT FREE!!

IF WE DO THIS WE CAN HANDLE ANY THREAT THAT COMES OUR WAY. KIDS WOULD NOT BE HANGIN ON THE CORNERS SELLING DRUGS, JOINING GANGS AND ACTING LIKE IDIOTS.OUR JAILS WOULD NOT BE FULL. WE AS A SOCIETY WOULD BE MUCH BETTER OFF.

PLUS OUR SOLDIERS WOULDN’T HAVE TO DO 3, 4, AND 5 TOURS.. THEIR FAMILIES WOULD BE MUCH BETTER OFF. EVERY PERSON CAN SERVE IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, EVEN IF IT’S IN A MAIL ROOM SOMEWHERE..

CHINA INVADES TAWAIN AND SOON AFTER RUSSIA GOES INTO GEORGIA AND OTHER OLD COUNTRIES THEY MISS FROM THE DAYS OF PAST..

WHAT THE HELL WOULD WE DO IF THEY DID THAT NOW WHILE WE’RE TIED UP IN IRAQ AND AFPAK AND EVENTUALLY YOU CAN PROBABLY ADD IRAN TO THAT LIST??

The US (and anybody else for that matter) can very easily afford to spend 5% of GDP on national defense. And spending money on national defense is one of the few things that governements spend money on that is not a waste.

History says different you fool.

But please go ahead and keep acting like a hippie demanding we virtually disarm ourselves with massive cuts.

Defense spending should be fixed at 5% of the GDP. We are already spending way too much money in our broken social security and health care systems, and tossing our defense $ at it won’t fix it.

Brain Fart in someone else’s quarters.

Opinion is fine, but whether this is sarcasm or not, most of us would like to see an intelligent discussion of the pertinent issues that directly or indirectly affect the lives of the people who fight our wars.

Your previous comment is of a higher caliber than this one. This is a critical forum in a time of war. History will be our witness.

The draft is needed for several reasons in our country. Wall Streeters first, no excuses! Make our criminal element work at destroying the enemy instead of destroying us. This is one of the biggest social programs that will help the economy in record speed. Dirty Dozen concept from our penal institutions!

Complete restructuring of support for the military family, too many loopholes to fall in
and drown. This family includes disabled veterans who have not had a rate structure assessment increase since my father was blinded in the Marines in WWII! Spend some time at the Intrepid Center in San Antonio and watch the process that the families go through with their
wounded warriors-all donation supported! This should be the military standard without donations! Watch a child learn to recognize the face of his warrior parent fresh out of the Burn Unit at BAMC at Ft. Sam or a young wife try to get her husband who has only one leg and no arms through the double doors of the treatment center, while she manuevers the wheelchair. This is the real cost of war! We should be so enthusiastic to this cost first and foremost, since a lifetime of suffering is never included in our calls for more money toward an already appropriated weapon system or a strategic positioning on policy for potential threats.

Tool up GM for military vehicles. Any
expensive military procurement should have at least 5 options to choose from in competitors. Where are the lower cost competitiors to the F-22?

You cannot solve a problem unless you understand the problem. If the military contractors would spend those political donations on building special vans for the wounded or designing equipment for the blind,
etc.., we might be supporting the sustainment of our services in ways that are so much in demand. Altruistic ? Yes! Can we change to this concept? Yes !

General Cartwright is stating the obvious. The idiots in the Bush administration knew this too, but instead chose to lie to the American people. The US will find a way to define “victory” in Afghanistan, achieve it, and withdraw; the American people will tolorate that war for only just so long.

*North Koreas and the Nazis, Taliban is actually debatable. Sunnis and Shia’s definately not. And North Vietnamese not by a long shot. Now many will say that I am biased. I will say to those, you have never looked in to the mirror because when vampires look in the mirror there is no reflection.

So what does the Army do instead — there is this magic process called “force generation” by which tired and untrained active and reserve units are made ready for an endless cycle of deployments. Very unimpressive, and it gives a rather chilling echo of the “Baker High School” mediocrity we espoused in the late 70s.

Strategic reserves ? Mobilization plans ? Multiechelon training ? Fuggedaboutit. That would be antiquated, cold war era thinking. That would be too much like the ways of the past — but now, we have broken from the bonds of reality, into this new era of “change”. We can have half the force at ALO 1 — in combat, and the rest sitting down at ALO 3 or below, but we’ll peek them up and kick them out the door when time comes to power them up…

Military spending at four percent of GDP or thereabouts is certainly a sustainable and reasonable level of expenditure. But that is not the Obama Administration’s long term budget, and there is NO backup plan. There is NO PLAN B. What these guys are doing to force modernization is just criminal — not just reductions in Title X programs, but massive cuts — at the 50% level — to the R&D budget. This is nothing more than the standard policy of borrowing against the future to pay for the present. We felt it in 1991, we saw it in 1996. It happened all through the Bush years. You cannot keep going like this indefinitely.

What is unforgiveable about all this is that this Pentagon is unilaterally relinquishing our strategic flexibility and betting the farm that this nation will have enough strategic warning –and the political will — to respond to the worst case scenario. I listened to speeches by great officers like General Bill Livesey about the consequences of unpreparedness since I was a lieutenant. And Livesey knew this first hand since he has been thrust into war in Korea as a young officer. I’m not sure who fed the inside-the-beltway gang all these stupid pills, but we need to think like that once again. We need to get out of the habit of treating our soldiers like fodder and our strategic investments like cash cows. Eventually you run out of soldiers and you run out of hamburger.

Buddy, check out how Secretary of Defense Gates would answer you from his speech in Chicago today:

“Consider that the last defense budget submitted by President George W. Bush for Fiscal Year 2009 was $515 billion. In that budget the Bush administration proposed – at my recommendation – a Fiscal Year 2010 defense budget of $524 billion. The budget just submitted by President Obama for FY 2010 was $534 billion. Even after factoring inflation, and some of the war costs that were moved from supplemental appropriations, this defense request represents a modest but real increase over the last Bush budget. I know. I submitted both of them.

In total, by one estimate, our budget adds up to about what the entire rest of the world combined – friend and foe alike – spends on defense. Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, D.C., would that be considered “gutting” defense.”

Why plan to go all the way to Afghanistan, or Korea, or Iraq to kill dangerous people when there are already enough right here in the USA.
Hahahahahahaha!!! I got you by the balls on that one.

Or you can come to Germany and try to kill me to rescue your fellow travelers at Ramstein Airbase. You see I live in a house just outside the fence and I and my friends are digging a tunnel underneath the base to pack with TNT. We are not going to detonate it however. We are just going to let it sit there. If it does eventually go off it will be an act of fate, not a action that we finalized. It is just a scientific experiment to see if fate will cause something to go boom that has never had a detinator added to it. So do not worry be happy.

Guess where I learned that trick?
Guess which trick that I am talking about?

Someone may accuse me of being a criminal or a terrorist or even get really nasty and call me an idiot or a fool. I can only say that it takes one to know one. A gay pinko commie friend. Oops I meant to say fiend.

Did you know that it is very difficult to know when someone is being saterical on the internet because you can not hear the infection in their voice.

We are going to cut defense & doing away with the long established doctrine of being able to fight & win two conflicts at once is a key component to “justifying” the cuts.

After all even NOW we are fighting two wars at the same time (although you might actually say it is in fact the same war on two battle fronts but the resutl is the same)…