Comment Re:But is it reaslistic? (Score 1) 369
Is there any chance that you can spot the nonsense there?
I am starting to detect a whiff of nonsense, now that you mention it. Maybe it's the fact that you're conflating "not doing exactly what cold fjord would do" with "taking no action" or just total bullshit like this:
Refusing to capture and interrogate terrorists provides just as much information as capturing and interrogating them.
I must have missed the announcement that President Obama had decided to stop all capture and interrogation of terrorists. Or wait, did you really mean that there was a case when you disagreed with him on a particular policy about capturing and interrogating a certain set of people under certain circumstances? Because that would sound a lot more like a rational argument and a lot less like ridiculous hyperbole and demonization of people who don't agree with your policy preferences. But we can't have that.
Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels
OK, so since this is what you posted in response to my "what should we be doing" question, I assume that you think that the best use of resources to fight small groups of well-hidden off-the-grid terrorists is to increase the size of our standing army (measured in "number of troops" and not some other metric), build more amphibious assault vehicles, keep the A-10, upgrade the F-18, buy an extra 20 littoral combat ships, etc. The implication being that without those sorts of tools, we're going to have a hard time fighting these guys. This is what I mean by "stupid policy reaction" to scary bad guys. Buying a bunch of big iron weapons and building up the size of the standing army to root out terrorists seems like one of the least efficient and most knee-jerk ways of spending money to stop terrorists.
A giant ass military is great if your goal is to destroy the war fighting infrastructure of an enemy nation or to convince the median citizen of that country that waging war against us is a bad idea. But a giant ass military has historically proved to be not a particularly great tool at convincing the tail members of the political distribution to stop fighting a guerrilla war. In fact, it also seems like it has historically not been a great tool even for fighting those remaining stragglers. Unless you're going to do it Roman style and starting exterminating citizens and sowing their fields with salt until the terrorists stop, I don't think that more combat ships and armored fighting vehicles are going to do us much good on this one.
DOD is great for the 1% of Americans involved with the military. Unfortunately that doesn't do much for the other 99%.
So your position is that even though we've known about plague as a weapon for centuries, and even though we saw it used in World War II by the Japanese, and even though we put tons of R&D money into germ warfare scenarios throughout the Cold War, the government never bothered to come up with any sort of mitigation plan for a bio attack on the US that did anything other than take care of the military? And now that we know about this Laptop of Doom, Obama is derelict in not correcting that colossal oversight? That's a multi-generational failure of epic proportions. Surely the only thing that will fix this is more boots on the ground.
There are plenty of groups associated with al Qaida and ISIS. The fact that one is doing that says nothing about what another has been able to do.
Indeed. And if only we had the budget to build a few more submarines and armored fighting vehicles, we might know so much more. Damn you Obama!