[More Cowbell]

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.

It's all just semantics. You consider "smaller military" to mean less troops, I consider it to mean a smaller defense budget. Although I don't think we really need to add more troops right now either, we just need to quit sending our soldiers off to wars in places we don't need to be.

I'd rather not argue about words, though, since it seems we agree on this issue.