re: #132 Curtain of Oz

I go on a Ron Paul blog from time to time to give people a hard time. Not hard to do. However, I do find in fascinating how the right-leaning community is looking to define the movement. The Ron Paul nuts are isolationists at best. I have an issue with the fiscal plans, the spending, the gov’t intervention, the debt, but I don’t want to see our military squeezed. I like the idea of the tea parties, but the problem is, who are we partying with?

I don’t like the idea of seeing our military squeezed, as such, but some budgeting might do more good than harm. There are some areas where our equipment is way fancier than it needs to be, and the marginal benefit from the additional investment drops to almost nothing, especially against our low-tech foes.

I remember reading something by Robert Gates where he mentioned that in several cases we have very limited amounts of equipment because research is given as much money as they want to develop something fancy with bells, and when it comes down to it, we need more of the basic thing, rather than more bells. I think the example he gave was of planes- the aircraft that met the needs could have cost as little as 20% of what it wound up costing, but there were so many things added to every single one that the cost went way up, and they wound up with 1/5 as many planes. Now, some planes needed one or two of those parts, and others needed another few, but they wound up just putting them all on everything.