Bauman: The DOD Is A Black Hole

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I’m simply questioning the size of the endeavor and how it is that the allegedly most peace-loving, peaceful, liberty-loving people on the face of the planet or in the planet’s history, why we need at-the-ready expeditionary forces of 3 to 5 million people.  Who is it and how is it that we pissed the world off?  No one will answer that question.  I can tell you how.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Back to this piece here by Michael Bauman at Imaginative Conservative website on the size of the Pentagon.  I’ve already got an email hamper filled and we have phone calls about [mocking] “You don’t know anything about the Pentagon and you need to shut up.  You know why?  You know why there are 800,000 Pentagon civvy employees out there?  Because we do things you don’t want military grunts doing.”  I actually do, believe it or not listeners, understand that.  I’m perfectly well informed that that’s what you do and that’s why your position is necessary, or in Washington speak it’s necessary.  I’m simply questioning the size of the endeavor and how it is that the allegedly most peace-loving, peaceful, liberty-loving people on the face of the planet or in the planet’s history, why we need at-the-ready expeditionary forces of 3 to 5 million people.  Who is it and how is it that we pissed the world off?  No one will answer that question.  I can tell you how.  Back to Bauman and “The Department of Defense Budget Challenge.”

[reading]

Pentagon-run grocery stores do not do it. Axing them saves 9 billion a year. Eliminating non-military research saves 6 billion.  Educating military children on bases in the US:  costs almost 11 billion.  Research in global warming does not do it. Cutting back on that saves us another billion dollars a year. I’m an ex-Marine. I know the importance of the Marine Corps blues and greens, which are uniforms of great distinction. Marine Corps greens are a world away from greens in the Marines. We need the former, not the latter. You get the picture. Hagel doesn’t.

But my point is not about Chuck Hagel. My point is about the DOD, which does to expenses what the CERN lab in Geneva does to particles — it accelerates them almost beyond human imagination. Or, to maintain the scientific analogy, the DOD is a massive black hole from which not even light itself can emerge, much less taxpayer money.

It’s time to change the game.

You don’t change the game by leaving it in the hands of politicians who think their re-election hinges upon more pork for their constituents. You don’t change it by trusting it to career bureaucrats in the DOD, whose very livelihood depends upon continued or increased annual funding. You don’t even change it by appeal to the leftist greenies, who normally deplore the military–industrial complex, except now when its funding is their funding too.

Maybe the game is so far gone it can’t be changed. If it can’t, then Hagel should know it. But he didn’t say.

I think it’s basically an impossible mess. If it is as bad as it looks to me, I do not trust the folks who run government to fix it. [Mike: And well you should not, Mr. Bauman.] They have the opposite of a Midas touch. It’s not that everything they touch turns to gold; it’s that everything they touch turns to garbage and costs a lot of gold.

Fix the DOD? We’ve been trying to fix baseball for years, ever since the designated hitter rule snaked its filthy way into just half of MLB. If you can’t fix something as elegantly simple as baseball, you can’t fix the most complicated and advanced system of national defense the world has known.

I don’t normally descend into a counsel of despair, but this time I’m dangerously close. It reminds me of the movie title, “No Way Out,” which, you’ll recall, was about the DOD.

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Mike:  Who was in “No Way Out”?  I can name this song in three notes.  I remember, Kevin Costner.  Costner was the double agent.  Of course back then, in the early ‘90s, it took a computer about two days to reprocess the pixels in a jpg that a modern computer can do in 25 seconds.  Anyway, it’s an interesting post.  Read it in today’s Pile of Prep at MikeChurch.com.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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