Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that a country who continues to
spend more on the military and military activities than it does on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. What follows is part of an blog written by Helena Cobban on her blog www.justworldnews.org. Hopefully it will give us something to ponder.
"...the Bush administration is proposing sinking
$419.3 billion into purely military goods and services in Fiscal Year 2006.
By way of comparison, the amount the Bush administration is requesting
for all non-military international work is $33.6 billion.
Weiner (of the NY Times) wrote:
"Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program,
called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion...
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by
the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the
communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor
does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat
weapons and technologies to forces beyond [the] first 15 brigades
[out of about 45].
Now some of the military's advocates in Congress are asking how to
pay the bill.
...The Army is asking Congress to approve Future Combat while it is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs, according to the Congressional Research Service, now exceed $275 billion. Future Combat is one of the biggest items in the Pentagon's plans to build more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion."
I'd like to, er, humbly submit that maybe it's not the "FCS" system that the US citizenry and our representatives in Congress "need to get right"... Maybe instead it's our whole approach to the rest of the world?
I mean, why on earth should we think that a globalized "Manifest Destiny" mentality backed up simply by hard steel power that is also, um, "highly networked" or whatever the appropriate FCS jargon is-- that this would do anything to strengthen the wellbeing of our communities or the security of our nation?
It didn't work for the South African authors of apartheid... No reason at all it should work for us. So, please! Let's focus all our efforts, and our spending, and our technological wizardry into getting back into right relationship with the rest of the world, instead... That way lies security. And that is the "seamless web" to which we should truly be paying attention.
