Letter to the Editor: What Are We Getting for Massive Defense Spending? 

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Picture a box with $1 million inside of it. How many boxes like that would satisfy the safety of the United States? What is the price of our freedom?

Consider what the Department of Defense has accomplished in some past and present events as an indication of what a burden it must be to defend this country, and weigh our own attempts at trying to ease this pain.

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed in rubble and the Pentagon suffered an attack, not a single military aircraft was dispatched until all the damage was accomplished.  The president remained undisturbed in an elementary school in Florida.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building found ourselves ensuring our legislators’ safety by using bicycle racks to keep the “tourists” away.

And this past week saw our Department of Defense unable and unwilling to take a balloon out of our skies.

Keep these things in mind when our new Congress seeks to cut spending and see if they mention this:



That image of a box filled with a million dollars — how many? This year, not terribly different from any other year, we gave the Department of Defense 2,000 boxes just like the one I had you envision.

To make this analogy easier and less complicated to illustrate, I rounded up the $1.9 trillion budget to an even $2 trillion.

 

Dennis Shain 

Centralia