That was unencrypted downlink, so troops on the ground could receive the signals without expensive equipment. The control frequencies are encrypted.

Lets see long difficult training pipeline with a high washout rate, and not a huge poll of talent while keep quality high. Lack of buy in by the normal military, so even before contracting there weren't enough SF available. Combined with high rate tempo high risk deployments with high causality rates. Really even without contracting it is unlikely that we would have enough, particularly if we had to dedicate quite a number for PSD missions.

Honestly it isn't perfect, but contracting out the State department's specialty non-direct combat jobs, allowed it the DOD to free up a limited pool of SF soldiers for direct combat roles.

<quote><p> I was first really shocked about military outsourcing when I saw a photo of L. Paul Bremner III, the proconsul for Iraq, being guarded by a group of Blackwater people.</p><p>How on earth is this justified - forget the question of allegiance and loyalty, outsourcing has got to cost more than using your own troops.</p><p>What happens now seems to be
- USG invests hunderds of thousands or millions of dollars in training for 1334 soldiers and pays them a civil service salary
- Mercenary corp hire them and pays them double their salary
- USG contracts Mercenary corp, and gets its own soldiers back and four times the price and one quarter the loyalty.</p></quote>

<p>The US military isn't really trained for PSD work. Blackwater and other contracting companies takes Special Forces soldiers and trains them specifically for the PSD missions that they do for the state department.</p>

<p>Now the US military could train some of it's soldiers for PSD missions, but they already have a shortage of Special Forces soldiers.</p>

We don't have bases in 130+ countries, we have military presence in 156 countries (2002 number), but that can be as small as a team of advisers. We have bases in 63 countries. Some may be unneeded, but many are needed for logistical reasons. For example it's better to fly injured service members to Germany, rather than all the way to the US.

And raising taxes rarely raises revenue, particularly when you do it to the "rich" as they are the ones with the political connections to get exceptions put into the law. On top of that they are more likely to have the ability to use those exceptions to structure their income to avoid those taxes.

We spend MORE on Social Security every year than we would spend on nuclear weapons in ten years. Add in Medicare, and Medicaid also costs more per a year than our nuclear weapon program would cost in a decade.

It's not a distraction, social programs like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the larger budget item than defense spending.