I just had a chance to read this: http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01 "9/11 live: the NORAD tapes" There are several amazing things about it but mostly, it is anticlimactic for me: Yep, This is the military I know; the one I was part of in the first gulf war. Being asked to do the impossible, with the unusable, for the unknowing. Feeling incompetent. Finding out after the fact that your intell was wrong, your orders were ineffective, and the civilians had already taken the brunt of it. Not that we didn't have our shining moments... http://www.massmind.org/techref/other/incompetence.htm What is amazing about it is: - how truly bad the communications between the agencies was. - how the military equipment couldn't even find Washington D.C. relative to the area they were monitoring. - how no-one was ready to defend our country in even the smallest way. - how ashamed the military was of their performance. They "cooked the books" despite not being at all at fault. - how, even though the military men, "made all the right calls", they were literally hours behind the actual events of the day. - How the heck Vanity Fair got an exclusive on this report. Ewww... I had to look at ads for "new fall fashions." One of my favorite parts is the FAA reporting the hijackings to the FBI and not the Military, because hijackers just fly some where and land, then make demands right? One of the valid points in "Atlas Shrugged" was that dependence that people have on "It has always been that way." And it has to be taken in perspective: 60,000 Americans die on the roads every year. 3,000 died in 9/11 and any terrorist who even thinks about trying that again will pay for it at the hands of Americans who have Flight 93 well in mind. http://www.massmind.org/techref/other/911.htm Some time near Christmas, this year, more US soldiers will have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. We already passed that mark if you include civilian contractors. I guess what I would love for people to think about after reading this post is that the military, despite all the crap about how much they waste or how large our defense budget is, are really not all that well equipped. Especially in the low tech, infrastructure, and self defense areas. In fact, the military I remember was NOT wasteful at all. We scrimped and saved and made do. The entire 7 years I was in, I found 1 area were a civilian contractor had managed to put one over on the military and sold a "quadrantal error corrector" which was a connector box between the radios and the antennas... which turned out to be empty except for the wires and some foam. That part had never failed before, and when one of our birds suffered a lightning strike right on top of it, we found there were none in the supply system, the company was long gone, and when we opened one up to try to duplicate it... Well, We didn't need to. But that was very much the exception rather than the rule. Today, I hear stories of our boys scavenging body armor, tearing apart old cars to add some shielding to their humvee's and making do with systems that were built in the 60's. I'm sure the military is trying as hard as it can, but mounting a war half a world away costs $$$ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-military25sep25,0,55559 67.story?coll=la-home-headlines Years ago, I did some research and came up with some interesting statistics about pre-war military funding and the effect it has on a soldiers chance of surviving. I made it into a T-Shirt; still have a few, which I wear from time to time. Here is what it says: COST OF WAR PEACE TIME MILITARY FUNDING VS PERCENT U.S. FORCES KILLED IN ACTION DEFENCE DATE WAR FUNDING* K.I.A. ----- ----- ------- ----- 1917 W.W.I $0.3 B 24.9% 1942 W.W.II $0.9 B 25.0% 1950 Korea $12.0 B 9.4% 1965 'Nam $41.0 B 6.7% 1991 Gulf $200.0 B 0.6% HOW MUCH ARE YOUR KIDS WORTH? *Average pre-war, peace time, defense funding in billion dollars per year. Sources: The Federal Budget and Defense Weekly. Cool thing to have on your chest huh? It starts a lot of fun conversations. Can we afford more funding for the military? Well, the interesting thing is, our military budget is actually a minor fraction of the gross national product. It's about 17% of the budget: $2.57 trillion budget; $419.3 Billion to the Department of Defense http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/budget06/graphs/c ategoryGraphs_020705.html We spend more on Social Security (21%, not saying we shouldn't) and on health care (adding Medicare and other Health items for a total of 23%). And running a war has drained the military coffers. More than that, a lot of the military spending is in preparation for things that will most likely never happen. I'm not second guessing, I have no clue what will happen either. I'm just saying we should spend the money on general good things that keep our kids alive and our boarders safe rather than on big ships or long range missiles designed to bother other countries. Stay out of Iraq, Iran, Korea, etc... And spend the money keeping our country secure, our soldiers safe and our military flexible. The biggest shame of this war is that A) our kids are dying when there was no justification and B) the funds that could have gone to providing them with better equipment will now go to paying for the war. (yes, I'm sure that getting that bad Mr. Hussein out of there on behalf of HIS people was worth the death of OUR children, please don't tell me again. He wasn't funding WMD'd, terrorists, or anything else that could have killed OUR kids.) I guess what I'm trying to say is: Expect this war to cost, but the real cost is keeping our military men and women alive in the future. So pay your taxes and support our troops. --- James Newton, massmind.org Knowledge Archiver james@massmind.org 1-619-652-0593 fax:1-208-279-8767 http://www.massmind.org Saving what YOU know. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist