Stupid hippie math

Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades writes about a post that he found at Outside The Beltway which naively discusses this chart;

Gabriel Malor does a fine job of dissecting the author, Doug Mataconis, and his assumptions that there is no threat great enough to justify our military expenditures and that there is room for cuts in our military budget. But I’d like to add a couple of points;

When was the last time we were attacked, and what was the percentage of the world’s military spending of al Qaeda at the time of that attack? Where will the next attack come from? Aren’t we the target of nearly every mouse-sized government in the world and so our defense budget is nearly half of the entire world’s expenditures because we have to be prepared to defend our interests from half of the world?

Not only do we have to protect ourselves from every halfwit dictator and despot in the world, we have to do that without killing anyone, which would, apparently, improve the recruiting efforts of the forces arrayed against us.

We have to be prepared for artificially protracted campaigns because we allow our own citizens to give aid and comfort to all of our enemies at any given time. We have scores of dunder-heads who protect our enemies’ own war-making mechanisms with their scrawny bodies.

Not only that, we have to protect our defense facilities from the idiots in our own country who think it’s cool to interrupt our own security efforts. And we have to be non-lethal about it – a dimension not afforded our enemies and potential enemies.

Then factor in the fact that most of our allies won’t live up to their regional responsibilities unless they can put us in the vanguard so the the world has a convenient scapegoat in the case that the adventure wasn’t executed as expected.

In short, if the US wasn’t spending for defense like we are, the world would be a less-tolerable place to live. And just dick-measuring military spending doesn’t come close to telling whole story. Stupid hippies.

Category: Antiwar crowd, I hate hippies, Military issues