living by an air base.....believe me...there are way more than 14 jets... Gerhard Fiedler wrote: James Newtons Massmind wrote: > http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01 "9/11 live: the > NORAD tapes" > > There are several amazing things about it [...] Sorry if this starts to feel like spam (I'll stop it now, need to get back to work anyway :) but there's one quite amazing bit of info in that article I felt needed to be put in the context of James's message: > 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 > And spend the money keeping our country secure, our soldiers safe and our > military flexible. >From the link above: "Marr has only four armed fighters at his disposal to defend about a quarter of the continental United States. Massive cutbacks at the close of the Cold War reduced NORAD's arsenal of fighters from some 60 battle-ready jets to just 14 across the entire country." Fourteen defensive fighter aircraft out of a $400G+ budget? I really had thought -- rather ingenuously -- this would result in more. Gerhard -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist