The WaPo's first installment on their series about Top Secret America is up. The clear implication is that there are nearly a million people who are generating untold volumes of intelligence reports, most of which are of dubious worth and 99% of which will never be read by anybody.
I have no idea how many hundreds of billions of dollars are being blown because agencies like the DHS and DoD and all of those faceless contractors are suffering from edifice complexes. But the existence of all of those shadowy contractors and black-funded projects probably pose a far greater security threat to this nation than any group of terrorists living in the hills of Yemen and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon's current weapons procurement policies have amazed me for the past decade or so. Our enemy today is a buncha primitives living in caves armed with boxcutters and 1950's-era ex-Soviet weapons. WTF do we need $250 million stealth fighters to deal with these dickwads? Or "littoral combat ships" that are optimized to defeat the threat of, err, you're going to have to answer that question for me, because nothing the Pentagon tells me makes any sense. It's as if we're gearing up for World War III, and the rest of the world is shrugging their shoulders and saying, "eh, Americans, what can you do with'em?" and ignoring us entirely. I mean, if we had some actual enemy that would be one thing. But the Russian military is still armed with 1980's Soviet gear -- all their new high-tech stuff goes to India and China, and there isn't much of it in any event -- the Chinese military has no (zero) force projection capability beyond maybe 200 miles of the Chinese border, and no other military even begins to threaten anybody other than their immediate neighbors, none of whom are, well, us. And in the meantime our soldiers are still slogging along with a Vietnam-era rifle that didn't even work well *then*, much less *now*... a new updated rifle that didn't jam all the time would be a weapon which is *far* more useful in a fight against dickwads living in caves than stealth bombers are. But it's not happening. Baffling. Utterly baffling...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Baffled Penguin