Anyone
who truly wants to understand the mind-blowing insanity of the military
industrial complex just in terms of financial fraud and the undermining
of our defense capabilities should study the issue of the Bradley
Fighting Vehicle.
It has been estimated that the BFV
cost upward of 21 billion dollars(almost twice that in today's
dollars), over 16 years of development. While the vehicle went on to
become an effective infantry carrier, the unbelievable costs involved
and the initially inferior product undermined the safety of both our
soldiers and our budget. Other nations have been developing comparable
weapons, such as the modernized BMPs from Russia. Even armored personnel
carriers from designers that were Italian, Ukrainian, Israeli, South
African, etc. have produced good vehicles for tiny fractions of this
cost and in a tiny fraction of the time involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/03/books/corrupt-from-top-to-bottom.html?pagewanted=1
Compare
this to the Italian Centauro line, developed for well under a billion
US dollars, and is actually much safer than our Strkyker fighting
vehicle. The Stryker has had controversial safety record that is not
easy to ignore. Nor was it a cheap system to develop, coming in at an
estimated 15 billion dollars.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1067399/posts
We
are even becoming more vulnerable because of the military industrial
complex. It can't stop spending, it doesn't care what the results are,
it doesn't care how many foreigners die, and it resists attempts for
people within the system to see how much horror it is inflicting all
around the globe through private military contractors and other
mercenaries, or even current service members. Not all of these
combatants really want to be in the fight, but they either do what they
are told or go where the money tells them to go. Its death and
destruction, and all these radical elements are out there growing in
response to it. Putin has even said this so clearly when he talks about
how the United States continues to create extremism when it is
convenient for them, caring much more about how it affects US interests
than how many people were dying for them. Well guess what, the rest of
the world cares, because for the most part they are the ones doing the
dying.
Don't even get me started on Vietnam. Ho Chi
Min was at the Treaty of Versailles, beggin the West to allow Vietnam to
determine their own fate, but he was ignored. The West traded Vietnam
around like it was their property and then when they fought back against
that the only ones they were able to turn to were the Russians. We
could have been an ideological influence on Vietnam, being their friend
and mentor as they modernized and joined the international community.
Instead they sat by as the British and then the French treated them like
subjects. The Soviet Union truly was a nasty beast that was rife with
problems, but we drove Vietnam toward them and then we bloodied the hell
out of them for it.
Ok, here's a good way to
understand Vietnam... Imagine you are at a card game in an old timey
saloon, and one of the players you fear the most has a buddy who is
weak. You know you need an excuse to go after the big guy if you don't
want everyone to turn on you, so you treat his buddy like dirt, and keep
messing with his cards and chips when he isn't looking. Finally, you
just start beating the crap out of him until finally a gunfight breaks
out and you kill a huge percentage of everyone in the saloon. Then the
little guy gets more backbone than you expect, and his big buddy jumps
in and pretty soon you have to tuck tail and run out of the saloon.
Then, after all that, you pay off or intimidate all the witnesses and
lie to anyone else who comes along so you can paint yourself as the good
guy, even though there really is no good guy anymore.
The
worst part is that this sort of thing became profitable along the way.
Over two million human beings died in the Vietnam War, and millions more
perished through the region as a result of the instability it caused.
It took lots of bullets and bombs to do that though.
Thought I was getting sidetracked?
gao-u-s-has-fired-250000-rounds-for-every-insurgent-killed
Consider that fact. We spend money on 250,000 bullets for every single insurgent we kill. That's just bullets.
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