Letters - The Defense We Need, and Can Afford - NYTimes.com:
In “A Military for a Dangerous New World” (editorial, Nov. 16), you call attention to the fact that the Pentagon’s total budget in 2008, including spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is “nearly equal to all of the rest of the world’s defense budgets combined.”
Excessive defense budgets have been the case for many years, predating our entry into those two wars. Nearly five decades ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the danger of an unchecked military-industrial complex, a warning that has been more honored in the breach than the observance.
During our current financial emergency, when the federal deficit is certain to reach unprecedented levels, we can no longer afford to spend many billions of dollars on new generations of weapons systems whose only real-world military match is our own currently deployed weapons systems.
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