What Most Americans Don't Know About Our National Defense Budget--But Should

There is an excellent, even important article out presently at Alternet I wish all adult, voting-age Americans would read. It is this.

How to Blow $700 Billion and Lose Wars

A Guide to America's Exploding Defense Budget and Military Failure

Step 1: Buy the most expensive weapons in history. Step 2: Don’t use them, since they mostly don’t work

And before any military patriots or just disbelievers dismiss the article, out of hand, before reading it, they should know it's written by a Veteran and who served in Iraq, on the ground. It's not from some "Left Wing" "librul" they can or should dismiss.

A bit from the article:

This year, President Trump signed the largest defense budget in our history: $700 billion. The budget includes $13.7 billion for 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which according to CNN are “in service and mission capable only 26 percent of the time.” Not a single F-35 jet has yet to see combat duty.

The budget will provide $4.5 billion for the construction of a new Ford class aircraft carrier, $450 million for three Littoral Combat Ships, $4 billion for two new guided missile destroyers, $5.5 billion for two new Virginia Class submarines, and tens of billions more for upgrades and repairs on various aircraft and naval vessels. Two of the guided missile destroyers already in service were involved in deadly collisions with cargo ships in the western Pacific last year. A Navy investigation revealed that for all of the hundreds of billions spent on defense, there was apparently not enough in the budget to provide for adequate training in standing watch and driving Navy combat ships...

He finishes the article perfectly, to me. It's something I've been saying for some time.

Fifteen years in Iraq. Seventeen years in Afghanistan. There is no end in sight.

From 2011 to today, 2018, we more than doubled our national defense budget from 354 billion dollars to 700 billion.

We have no new enemies. No new group has attacked us or is attacking. Or is going to.

We are weakening, actually weakening our nation with all this absurd, obscenely expensive and very wasteful spending.

Understand this:

Our defense budget is very huge, very bloated and very wasteful and is actually making the nation weaker.  Not stronger.

What are we going to do about this, America?

Links:

The Secret Side of Military Spending & The Wastes of War

We Are Spending a Trillion on War 

and We Need to Own Up to It

The 10 Most Blatantly Wasteful Defense Items

Note this next article is from the American Conservative magazine:

Expanding the Military Budget Is 

Wasteful and Unnecessary'

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion 

in bureaucratic waste

The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More 

Than Australia