stickdude90
9 hours ago
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...

jri500 anon-fv7m
6 hours ago
Bill Clinton and his buddy, Bernard Schwartz (LORAL Space) GAVE China our ballistic missile gyroscope guidance technology. Just gave it to them because liberals couldn't stand the fact that the US was the world's lone super power at the time. China's missiles couldn't reach orbit. Clinton moved the gyro technology from Defense to the Commerce department, and put a CIA satellite on a Chinese rocket. And when that rocket crashed, the Chi Coms sifted the wreckage and reverse engineered our gyros. When Clinton took office, China had zero (0) nuclear missiles capable of hitting the US mainland. When he left office, they had 20. //

Dieter Schultz stickdude90
6 hours ago edited
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...
I think you might be looking at the US being forward deployed and allied with nations around the world... through the wrong lens.

Yes we're spending money stationing forces around the world and, yes, some... maybe a lot of these countries... don't appreciate or deserve our protection but... look at it from the point of view of avoided costs.

But, we can't understand avoided costs unless we consider what isolationism might really cost us in the bigger scheme of things.

We were, mostly, isolationists between 1910 and 1940... not spending money with alliances and forward deploying our forces. Because of that the bad guys in the world didn't believe we'd respond as they gobbled up other countries. What they did believe, and what Churchill said so elegantly in some of his writing, was that if the US allowed its natural allies to fall, the position that the US would be in, strategically, would be difficult in the extreme.

So we stayed out of the areas but, when we were finally forced to act the costs in treasure and lives of our youth was great... far, far greater than they would have been if the Germans and Japanese really believed we would fight to stop them.

Since the end of WWII we've made a lot of mistakes and many of those mistakes have cost us 10s of thousands of our youth and untold treasures but, even with Russia's aggressive moves in the world, we haven't had a repeat of the carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of the country's treasures.

But, we should ask ourselves, even if we've helped protect people that didn't seem to appreciate and value our sacrifice, if, like happened to us leading up to WWI and WWII, would we have likely gotten sucked into another one of the continent's or world's battles and cost ourselves 10 or 100 times the loss of carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of our treasure anyway?

I see the discussions about forward deploying our forces around the world much like the Chesterton's Fence and we should ask ourselves, why that fence was needed in the first place?

Many in this country just want to tear down that fence but, as Chesterton might see it: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”