Eugene Robinson:Trimming a bloated defense budget

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111504510.html

I come not to bury the manifesto issued last week by President Obama's debt-reduction commission, but to praise the most welcome of its ideas: Slash defense spending along with everything else.

The panel's co-chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, identify $100 billion in defense cuts that could be made in 2015. That would be too little and too late, but what's almost revolutionary is the notion that if we're ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" down to size.

(snip)
"The time has come to reduce military operations. The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan . . . to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life," Karzai told The Post.

All right, then, let's save American lives and a ton of money. Let's oblige him.

The United States' armed forces are a major guarantor of security in the world, which is a burden the US has to bear, at least for the time being. I wouldn't be too quick to take a chainsaw to the armed forces.

Now, as for kicking the military-industrial complex in the teeth and stopping pointless, stupid wars, I am entirely in favor of that. We all know the bureaucracy at the Pentagon is bloated and now, as evidenced by generals Stanley McCrystal and David Petraeus, starting to grow a mind of its own. Kill the complex and knock the military bureaucracy down to size, and use the savings to ensure the world is a safer place. US foreign policy in general should be "To our allies: We're the good guys, and we can help you quite a lot with your goals. To our enemies: If you leave us be, we'll do the same. But if you cause us problems, we can bring down the end of the fucking world on you. Remember that."

Halliburton will be very angry.