A Veteran's post you can count on, my friend

This just in from the Defense Business Board, an internal management oversight body.

The Defense Business Board,a senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department's current budget is "not sustainable," and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military's most prized weapons programs.

The idea of reinvesting funds currently being invested in almost completely useless weapons systems in favor of infrastructure funding strikes me as eminently sane. No doubt, it's why such 'spreading of wealth' hasn't happened in the last 20 years. But in this case, robbing Peter to pay Paul makes sense because Peter isn't doing anything but actively creating a fear of the end of the world. Rational individuals need to ask, do we really need Peter at best creating neuroses and at worst destroying the entire earth when our bridges are falling down?

Not that I'm opposed to destroying the entire earth on principle if it preserves our freedom. I'm as patriotic as the next guy. I just see a certain --let's call it incongruity--in the application of force in that instance. Personally, leaving aside such high minded concepts as patriotism, god or country I'd much prefer to build our bridges.

The briefings were prepared by the Defense Business Board, an internal management oversight body. It contends that the nation's recent financial crisis makes it imperative that the Pentagon and Congress slash some of the nation's most costly and troubled weapons to ensure they can finance the military's most pressing priorities.

No kidding. I guess it's nice to know those guys in the Pentagon read the economic pages like the rest of us. For awhile there, as in the last 50 years, I thought they always assumed their costs were taken care of via patriotic pixie dust and the harsh rules of money only applied to the civilian economy, which is to say: all the rest of us.