Military cuts

Today Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, announced that the military would be cut by 500 billion over the next ten years and this reminded me of the age old battle between guns and butter. You recall in Econ 101 that was the way they referred to defense spending and spending on social programs. Over the years I have given a lot of thought to these two expenditures and I realize that you can never be sure if you are spending enough on defense so the tendency is to overspend. The thinking is that if you short social programs some people will suffer but if you short defense some might die. After WW 11 ended the people were fed up with war and the defense budget was cut way back. Five years later we were at war once again, this time in Korea. I am reminded of my brother in law who served in the Korean War. He was a tank commander. He went into war using WW 11 tanks and went up against new Russian built tanks. His tank had a 75 mm gun and the Russian tanks had 90 mm guns. His projectiles would bounce off the Russian tanks which had much thicker armor and their guns would destroy his tank before he even got in range to fire. 38,000 American servicemen died in that war and I have no way of knowing how many died because of spending cuts in the defense budget. During the recent Iraq War there was a lot of hub bub over the fact that our Humvies did not have the proper armor and some of our soldiers did not have bullet proof vests. It is very difficult to know how much to spend on defense and so we end up with a lot of waste in the defense budget. If we cut back too much we may never know unless our military people are faced with another conflict and then it is too late. The point is that defense spending is difficult to figure out