Adam+week+12

Of all the major leaps forward that have been made in various fields over the years, none has been so reckless or has had such potential for outright catastrophe as our increasing ability to kill one another. In the documentary, “Why We Fight” various proposals were put forward about what the motivations are for modern American military conflicts. Some were sold by the right wing notion that we defend our freedom and spread democracy, some chose the other extreme, that it’s all about oil and discrimination. What no one likes to think about, is how profitable a thing war is, in fact it is an agonizing truth that the Second World War essentially //saved// this country from the depression. In the decades since WWII this country has continued to drop thousands of bombs, fire thousands of missiles, and deploy thousands of soldiers, and it has very little positive effect on anything, but when 100,000 bombs are dropped, 100,000 bombs need to be replaced, and therein lies the potential for a crisis. The arms race with the Soviet Union came and went, there is now no nation on earth which has even 50% of American military power, yet we continue to fund more and more advanced methods of warfare. It appears that without a foreign power to compete with, the branches of the military and their various contractors compete with other. We have had dominant military technology for decades, yet there’s always some supplier who says they have a better fighter, a better tank, a better bomb, and the defense department instantly spends billions on it, because of course we need to have the very best. In all of this somehow no one realizes that the existing technologies are already impossibly superior to anything that any enemy of the USA possess. How is it we need to spend billions of dollars on a plane which can shoot 6 different targets from 100 miles away, when our soldiers are getting killed by bombs from junk found in the streets? The September 11th attacks were orchestrated with a few sets of $6.95 box cutters from Home Depot, yet hundreds of billions of dollars of technology has not yet led us to those responsible, it is apparent that security is not the primary interest of those who control the military. This technology leads to another problematic reason why we fight, for the people in charge, it can be downright fun. A general in The Pentagon pushes through a few hundred billion for a new weapons system, and then he wants to see it in action. Our technology allows him to call a base in Iraq, order the weapon system deployed, watch a real time display from a satellite, and watch as an entire city is erased by his command. It is extremely dangerous when the lives of soldiers become toys for various heads of states to pit against each other, when we impress other nations by what we can destroy, instead of what we can create. This is why we fight, as always it comes back to the money, to the idea that a country can survive by producing enormous quantities of weapons, and when the demand for weapons falls, we have to find somewhere else to use them, so that we can on building more and more. This guise of, “the arsenal of democracy,” is absurd, from Vietnam to Somalia, to Iraq and now Afghanistan, has no one noticed that this mission of, “building a democratic nation,” has never worked, not once? Our technology has turned into to a toy for some national leaders, and we must insure the future does not continue to obey the greed of the few over the safety of the planet.