Tuesday, November 11, 2008

America's New Weapon, the slingshot

Apparently, people are saying the Pentagon's budget is bloated. You don't say! in a relatively detailed article that i read on reference from another article i realized that Obama can really cut the budget deficit down by shedding overly-expensive, and frivolous military spending. Though the article says that a lot of the budget is for personnel, there's still gonna be a lot of cost-cutting for experimental weapons programs.

I think that the army will eventually have to downgrade its advanced weaponry to the slingshot. Well, maybe not that much, but you can bet your AR'15s that joe soldier won't be getting any new toys for xmas next year.

What has me delighted about this is that our military spending is the highest per-capita on the planet, unless you count Waco back in the 90's, and needs to be reduced. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be equipped for wars that we should be fighting, i'm saying that sometimes the hottest technologies don't beat old-fashioned know-how.

I read in the book Moving Mountains by the Quartermaster in the Gulf War that he won a mock battle against high-tech weaponry using uninterceptable messages and orders written on 3x5 cards! The high-tech part of the army got routed. So there's room for non-high tech weaponry if our strategy and execution is novel.

I also read in the Pentagon's new map by Thomas Barnett which predicted the tranformation of the American fighting forces towards more of a peace-keeping and nation-building force. Granted, this was dismal since the third year in Iraq, but was glimpsed in India after the Tsunami when the Aircraft carrier came into port and was cheered by the indian populace, and commenced to produce massive quantities of clean water for the people whos water supply was now mixed with millions of gallons of salty ocean water.

So when i say the slingshot, i both mean the reduction in the complexity of vehicles, and a reduction in the government-financed research into them as well as the predilection for America to avoid fighting a war, armed with more of a pitchfork (for farming) and a slingshot than a cannon
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