[ronald_reagan]

I advocate an end to the ceaseless increases in defense spending, increases which often end up wasting our country's financial resources. Even more importantly, I am opposed to the senseless wasting of American lives with fighting in places where we don't need to be.

Do I want our country to be safe? Of course. The problem is that increases in funding to our nation's military have nothing to do with improving national security. They have everything to do with lining the wallets of defense contractors who stick their fingers in the backs of our lawmakers and make them say what they are told to. Our country's defense budget is ridiculously bloated by all this backscratching, and needs to be scaled back.

I think your first post was overly simplistic, and it caused me to not understand.

If what you speak of above is actually a 'smaller military', then I too support just that. However, I think its actually incorrect to say from your post above that you want a smaller military. Having a smaller military means less troops, less equipment, less armor, ect. I've written more letters than I'll ever care to count, to officials from top to bottom advocating a clean up of the federal budget. Starting with entitlement reform, and then straight to the defense appropriations bill. The defense spending measures have too much pork, and too little competition. This years defense bill (just passed) was over 10% more than what Bush requested because of the added amendments and pork. We spend roughly 500 billion currently on the DOD, while the other 200 countries in the entire world... the ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD spends just under 500 billion. Our budget is over 50% of the entire world spending. This can be fixed quickly and easily. Our defense spending bill could be about 30-40% lower without sacraficing anything other than some campaign contributions.