(debated) much - or in a manner which (more than putatively) seeks the input of citizens re

Quo vadis? - since the dissolution of the USSR. The rhetoric remains cold-warish and even the cliches 'hawk / dove' appear to be just resting for a spell.

"More military spending" is deemed by one cliche-side as simply: the unarguably patriotic Thing to do. Undoubtedly the reverse is: let's disarm (I don't recall mentioning that straw dog?).

I submit that, before 'we' can assign some %-GNP or any other manifestly *arbitrary* indicator of OK-patriotic-spending - there needs first to be a public, massively debated and reviewed and then debated some more: "sense of purpose". An overt, explicit replacement for the vestiges of M.A.D.. I know of no such - even "mock-plebiscite".

There's a major qualitative change in our position vis-a-vis the entire world, and we are simply drifting with the hot air of a now deceased "permanent emergency state" -- which most of us alive today, took to be "the normal state for homo-saps".

It wasn't 'normal' however it was our average behavior, then. Now is different! (Unless we keep saying, it isn't.) I submit there is nothing like 'a national consensus' on:

WTF we *ought* to be doing - next, at home or in the world. Our One Party with Two Right Wings and a skeleton 'middle' is demonstrating neither 'direction' nor method. The ABM diversion, I submit - proves how 'tactical' is our group-think: how utterly devoid of anything like a long-term strategy for the US next, military or otherwise.

In this context - I think "%-GNP" is about as much Red-Herring as it is unimaginitive. It is cart-before-horse. You spend what you *must* after FIRST having plan, strategy and some sense of the citizenry - or it's just random waste pork. Again. IMO.

(And out there STILL: are all those thousands of nukes we all duped ourselves into overbuilding, knowing we *never could use a fraction of them!* except in a final M.A.D. unthinkable suicide.)

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A.