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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (545411)	1/21/2010 5:39:13 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576323

>>> What on earth is wrong with you that you defend these levels of spending? My son is a soldier. When he puts his life on the line I damned well expect there be NO LIMITs on the military budget. AT ALL.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (545411)	1/21/2010 7:37:08 PM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576323

Damm good presentation. I can hear my dad complaining. He will be 88 in February and when he retired at Boeing in 1977 was the manager of "Theater wide ballistic missile defense". His boss was the president of the company. He developed the Minuteman I and II ballistic missile systems. I remember many years later how pissed off he was at the Pentagon for wasting defense $$. Back in the 50's a system would cost X amount of dollars to develop and roll out but 100X to maintain and remain operational. MinuteMan I & newer generation II were solid fueled rockets that cost 1/1000 to maintain vs liquid fueled Atlas and Titan systems. It's funny but today 40 year old MinuteMan missiles are launching satellites. (the original boosters were cycled out because of their age but were still useful!) At least we got our $$ out of the system.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (545411)	1/22/2010 1:20:29 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576323

We do completly dominate military spending, but not quite to the extent show on that chart. China has all sorts of ways money goes to the military without showing up in their defense budget, they even have companies owned by the military. Also any country with a draft, devotes an important resource, its people, to the military without accounting for the true cost of that person's labor. Then in very poor conflict ridden countries the military may just take what it wants without much in the way of formal budgets. Instead of about a half, the US's portion of the world's resources devoted to the military might be more like a third or a bit more. While our GDP is between a fifth and a fourth.