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Slim Pickens demonstrates a unique outlook that works well for the general populace given current affairs.
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Sunday, February 16, 2003
USA to the world: "Try and stop us!"
A heavily armed nation is attacked, and the world feigns surprise at the reprise.
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A trillion here and a trillion there - and eventually you've got a real weapons program.
From the space-race, to geopolitical containment, many amusing developments emerged from the cold-war. But the best
one was the rise of the mega-military.
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Decades of regional disputes and coverage to contain an opposing force pouring it's own trillions into their military created something that was only hinted at by Eisenhower. A military that served no other purpose but to sustain itself - and multiply.
Weapons systems begat more weapons systems, until national security gobbled more than a quarter of every dollar of US's taxable income, and debt exploded in creating bigger and better toys for conventional and nuclear armed forces. Think about that - 25% of every dollar from the working population of 300 million wasn't enough to keep the whole thing fed - we had to throw a few trillion dollars into the red-column.
At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Navy was actually behind most of Europe. Portugal even had us beat. Not counting the merchant ships that were providing aid to the UK against Germany's "fortress Europe", most of the US fleet was stretched wafer-thin between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It was against that reality that gave Japan an almost plausible excuse to try to disarm the US in Hawaii.
That folly was then joined by Germany declaring official war against the US, which of course gave the US the excuse to bring the American public and it's resources into a conflict which the public - up until that time - held opinion-poll numbers greater than 90-percent against doing anything about Hitler.
We've heard the arguments that some in Japan's military wondered aloud if instead of removing the US from Pacific interests, their initial victory might have awakened a sleeping giant. Of course, the US began rationing resources and restructuring the whole of the economy to put us on a wartime footing. People made sacrifices all the way down to the smallest domestic level and of course the outcome was a new fleet, a massive air-force and the birth of atomic weaponry. This is all obvious historical exposition.
What wasn't imagined by the war-planners of the era was a 50 year spending program that would continue where WWII left off - only concluding with a massive modernization undertaking, devoted to creating and maintaining a conventional - and non-conventional military - capable of striking any country, with massive force, within hours of any disturbance.
The amusing part of the equation is that the US - of course - wasn't technically at war with anyone - and yet were spending ourselves into trillions of dollars of debt to fill a toy box with all of the wonderful weapons systems that provide untold hours of documentary programming on the Discovery Channel.
Problem was - apart from minor forays into Grenada and Panama - there really wasn't a whole lot to actually - "do" - with all these toys. Sure, we could - and would - fly stealth batwing B2 Grumman Aerospace jet-black sub-sonic bombers on round trips from Kansas to central Europe to launch the occasional satellite guided high-explosive pot-shot, but there really wasn't a real attack-and-response scenario available, outside of the occasional off-soil terrorist strike from a religious demographic that is dealing poorly with 1000 years of culture-shock.
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 Next page | In 1993 - things got interesting.
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