Ike Was Right About War Machine

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/30/60minutes/main892398.shtml

<snip>No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. …"

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.

[creeksneakers2]

1. What makes this all even crazier

is that nobody is threatening us. Not militarily, anyway.

[IndyOp]

2. You might add '60 Minutes - Andy Rooney' to your title -

I think people will be pleasantly surprised to hear that this came from him.

:kick:

[tabasco]

3. This is not the America I want to live in.

I do not consider this the "Land of the Brave" anymore. We are the land of war profiteering corporations and gullible citizens.

[punpirate]

4. I just wish...

... Ike had done more than talk about it as he was leaving. It was his first Sec. of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, who created the program to gear up major defense contractors for the Cold War, to always have the industrial capacity to provide enough equipment to fight a major war on short notice.

Ike ended up institutionalizing the military-industrial complex.