The Pentagon lost $850 Billion last year. Can either presidential candidate fix that?

Photo above - recently declassified photo of "Chabelley", one of two secret US military bases in Djibouti. Djibouti has a population of less than 1 million people.

Your senator wants you to know: none of the military bases in your state will be closed, no matter who wins the election in November. In my case (Florida) that would be 21 bases. Most of these are navy or coast guard bases. You’d think we’d be better at intercepting drug smugglers and human traffickers with all those resources, wouldn’t you? Maybe they were offline during a Microsoft/CrowdStrike security update? You can’t rule it out.

Well, if Florida is untouchable, there must be some places among the 800+ bases worldwide, right? How about Guantanamo Bay in Cuba? That one doesn’t do anything except waterboard prisoners captured 20 years ago, and become the focus of Cuban, Russian, and Chinese spying. Can’t close that one either? Damn it.

This is where someone who loves budget deficits, but hates the military starts to experience cognitive dissonance. Each base is less than 1% of the military budget. So, closing one “isn’t going to matter” with our $34 Trillion national debt. But we do have the world's most expensive military, are a laughingstock because we lost most of the wars we fought recently. The latest humiliation was the Afghanistan retreat. We lost in Vietnam. North Korea has one of our destroyers on exhibit as a war prize. China is menacing the Philippine Sea, where we have nine bases. So far none of our ships or planes are making the Chinese navy vamoose. It’s all on the tiny Philippine Navy.

I’d like to cancel the B21 bomber. Those suckers cost at least $1 billion each. Or maybe two billion, depending on which website you consult. $2 billion for a frickin’ airplane. That’s why we don’t have very many of them. Only around a dozen. The USA won World War 2 with the P51 mustang. They only cost $50,000 each. With inflation, that’s about $700,000 today. America could buy 30,000 mustangs for the cost of our dozen B21s. But we actually only needed 15,000 mustangs for all of World War 2.

America’s latest aircraft carrier (the USS Gerald ford) came in at around $12 billion – or six B21 bombers, if you like. And we have 11 carrier groups. These strike groups include at least 2 or 3 destroyers, guided missile cruisers, submarines, and probably one of those underwater UFOs we keep seeing blurry pictures of.

Will one of these 11 carrier strike groups prevent China from overwhelming Taiwan some weekend when we are having a software update failure? The USA is not only afraid to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but we also can’t stop piracy and drone attacks in the middle east and Africa. These are garage-assembled Iranian drones built with Amazon.com components. And the pirates have 30-foot skiffs, outboard motors, and rusty AK47 machine guns left over from the cold war.

Back to the $850 billion pentagon operating loss. I’m not suggesting we can eliminate the military. Just that we can’t seem to convincingly project power with the hardware we have on hand now. And what’s the point of having thousands of ICBMs – both land and submarine based – if those doesn’t allow us to right-size our conventional forces?

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. I’m asking our government to make a commitment to spending restraint be closing just one military base this year. How about Djibouti? We have 2 bases there. Can we possibly survive with just one?

I’m just sayin' . . .

[b][u][u]~Military budget of the United States - Wikipedia~[/u][/u][/b]