What are your thoughts about dramatically reducing "defense" spending?

@Diest TKO,

I know.

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@old europe,

old europe wrote:

. . . provided it had been prepared to shoot down a hijacked commercial jet full of civilians.

Once again, OE has hit the nail right on the head. Had air traffic control contacted NORAD immediately, had jets been scrambled, had they successfully arrived on an intercept course, you would have needed someone in a position of command responsibility willing to stick his neck and order the civilian airliners shot down. Had he done so, he would have averted the tragedy--but would never have been able to prove it were necessary. His career would have been over, and everyone, with 20-20 hindsight, would have called the decision unnecessary.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

But don't you think that if it wouldn't have been enough, then the notion that military reduction allowed 9/11 isn't substantiated by it?

There was very little time to act. A good chunk of it went by before the air traffic controllers even notified the military. Then the military was trying to find the planes when the first impact came. Even if they could have gotten there in time, without knowing that they planned to crash the planes they wouldn't have shot them down.

After 9/11 military spending was increased but it really does seem to me to be piggy backing on the tragedy, as I've seen no evidence that increased military spending would have prevented it, including what you've posted here.

Well, I'm not married to this idea, and the 9/11 thing can be right or wrong without affecting my general thesis. However, I'm curious now. What about the second flight into the Trade Center, and the plane that hit the Pentagon? What about stopping US 93 if the passengers hadn't? In most of these cases, didn't they know that the planes had been hijacked before they impacted their targets? Surely there's some minimum number of air bases necessary to effectively protect the country from the various things that might happen.

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@Brandon9000,

the analysis that I saw said that it is illegal by international law to fire upon a commercial aircraft, even when it was likely to be used in the terrorist method of 9/11. The military's ability to bring down these planes is a moot point. The air force would not have been able to follow the order to shoot down, as the order would have been an illegal one.

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@Brandon9000,

Have you thought about what's entailed in your scenario of shooting down the airliners?

First, it's no guarantee that they would actually be able to take out a modern airliner. Taking out an engine wouldn't be enough. Then you're spraying fuel everywhere.

Next you have an out-of-control airline crashing randomly in New York (or Washington, D.C.). Plus scattering pieces of itself everywhere.

All of this without the knowledge we have now that the WTC towers would collapse.

Everybody would be screaming about what a horrible decision it was. People like you would be telling people that they should have just let the planes crash....

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There is little doubt that there is room for substantial reductions in defense spending in this country. However, doing it wisely and intelligently, given the many, difficult to forsee external effects, and the many internal impediments to objective decision-making is likely to prove extraordinarily difficult.

Consider for a moment the time and procces required during the 1990s to achieve a political consensus on the closure of a hundred or so military facilities and bases that the various services themselves considered unnecessary. None of the states and communities affected wanted to see the closure of facilities in their communities and most lobbied very hard - with the active support of their Congressional delegations - to prevent their colosure. The Congress, owing to its venality, unable to make the needed choices set some quotas and designated an "independent" commission to make the choices for it (and give the Senators and Congressmen the all important political cover). Two years of hearings and negotiations were required before the first round of closures began -- and this was for the closure of facilities that the services themselves no longer wanted.

Beyond that the services themselves behave very much like all government brueaucracies whose top priority is always the preservation of itself, its powers, perogatives and, above all, its budget. Examples of such organizations voluntarily surrendering power, budget or even adapting willingly to new external conditions are rare indeed. While we always took a somewhat contemptuous view of civilian brueaucrats who stayed at their desks and always went home on time, the fact is that despite the personal challenges and bravado of military life our organizations behaved in much the same way as did theirs.

Then there are the defense contractors who have long since mastered the art of distributing the design and manufacture of their wares in key states and Congressional districts - all to garner political support for their programs. It isn't easy to kill a major Defense program - even when there is little justification for it and the senior officers in the Defense establishment themselves want to drop it.

I haven't even addressed our external situation, which itself presents a number of challenges and contradictions. Let me make just one point here. It is very difficult and risky to loosen the reins of power. There is great potential for unexpected challenges and fundamental disruptions to the balance of power. Things can easily pass out of control and beyond rectification. History provides many examples of this.

None of this means we can't or shouldn't substantially reduce our defense spending. It is simply very difficult to do ... and even harder to do wisely.

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@DrewDad,

Quote:

All of this without the knowledge we have now that the WTC towers would collapse.

the engineeers who designed the buildings were shocked that this event could bring down the buildings. There turns out to have been a design flaw. How could anyone have known?

Even Osama did not think that they would go down, he could not believe his luck, best as we can figure.

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@hawkeye10,

Not true. The weaknesses and advantages of such monococque structures are well known, and the inability of the flooring structure to withstand a prolongued high intensity fire was known as well. The fact is that no one foresaw the possibility that a heavily loaded 300,000 lb passenger jet with a near full load of fuel would impact the towers at high speed.

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@georgeob1,

Sorry Charley...you are not correct

Quote:

The structural engineers working on the World Trade Center considered the possibility that an aircraft could crash into the building. In July 1945, a B-25 bomber that was lost in the fog had crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. A year later, another airplane nearly crashed into the 40 Wall Street building, and there was another near-miss at the Empire State Building.[8] During the design of the World Trade Center, Leslie Robertson, one of the chief engineers, considered the scenario of the impact of a jet airliner"a Boeing 707 -- which might be lost in the fog and flying at relatively low speeds, seeking to land at JFK or Newark Airport.[8][9]

NIST found a three-page white paper that mentioned another aircraft-impact analysis, involving impact of a jet at 600 miles per hour (970 km/h), but the original documentation of the study was lost when Port Authority offices were destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center.[10] In 1993, John Skilling recalled doing the analysis, and remarked, "The building structure would still be there."[11] However, he may have put little thought to how the structure would behave in the intense fire that could result from an aircraft impact and simply assumed that the World Trade Center's lightweight trusses and columns would perform as well as the heavy masonry and steel structure in the Empire State Building.[12] In its investigation, NIST also found reason to believe that they lacked the ability to properly model the effect of such impacts on the structures, especially the effects of the fires.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center

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@hawkeye10,

You are merely quoting selected (and incomplete) records concerning what those in the design team considered. My statements are entirely correct. The time period that light weight steel trusses covered with shotcrete can withstand a concentrated fuel fire is an elementary bit of knowledge for any structural engineer. The stressed skin design of the WTC gave it very efficient floor plans by limiting interior vertical structures and the strength required in the concrete and steel core. However such structures are known to be subject to catastrophic failure if the skin is pierced. While the penetration of the skin seriously weakened the structure, it was the sequential collapsing of the floor structures that finally brought the buildings down.

The fact is the design engineers did not analyse the effects of a high speed impact by a heavy passenger jet with a full fuel load -- just as I wrote.

The evidence is that the terrorists who did the deed very likely did understand their potential to bring the structures down and that is why they chose departing coast to coast flights. This, after all was their second attempt to bring down the WTC.

My name isn't charlie.

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@georgeob1,

How about you admitt that you are wrong....you are not going to win this one

Quote:

One of those variables was the size and kinetic energy of aircraft that might accidentally strike the WTC (no one imagined intentional strikes). Mr. Robertson and others involved in design and construction of the WTC have repeatedly stated that back in the 1960s they could not have planned for the jetliners of 2001. Specifically, they modeled the effects of a hit by the largest aircraft of the day, the Boeing 707-320, and presumably calibrated their design to withstand it. Yet a comparison of the 707-320 with the Boeing 767-200's that struck the towers shows surprisingly small differences between them and, factoring in the 707's higher typical cruise speed, a case can be made that the design team actually modeled an aircraft with greater kinetic energy than those which struck:

http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Collapse:of:the:World:Trade:Center.html

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@hawkeye10,

"... a case can be made that ..." does not constitute a proof. Moreover since the proximate cause of the collapse was a prolongued high temperature fuel fire which caused the failure of the light weight and lightly insulated steel trusses that supported the floors, and since the behavior of such structures at high temperature was and is well-known, it is excceedingly likely that the design team, which included some expert structural engineers, did not consider tha high speed impact of a fully loaded & fuelled jet. Had they done so the building would have been designed differently.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Guy F. Tozzoli, who as director of the world trade department for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1962 until 1987 was a prime mover of the twin towers project, said they were designed to survive being struck by a Boeing 707, the largest jet of the day. The studies envisioned a low-speed impact by a plane lost in fog, he said.

And, initially at least, each tower did survive the high-speed impact of a larger jet, a Boeing 767.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/science/physical/18ASBE.html

modern methods show that this design could not survive the strike that was taken, but this was not known till after the failure. Those who designed the buildings thought that they had this covered.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

did not consider tha high speed impact of a fully loaded & fuelled jet.

the fuel load and the cruising speed of the aircraft that struck the WTC verses what it was designed to handle are nearly the same. Maybe Tozzoli is correct thought, that the impact speed the designers used was much less than cruising speed.

What was not supposed to happen was the insulation being knocked off of the steel during the initial impact , and it is not clear to me if the Asbestos that was planned would have stuck better than what was on the steel at the time of impact.

However, we are arguing about design, and what the designers thought that they had plannned for.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

However, we are arguing about design, and what the designers thought that they had plannned for.

No, instead I think we are arguing about what the designers, who with good reason fear liability action, are now saying about what they considered at the time.

The light weight structure could not withstand the fast gathering momentun of the sequential failure of the floor supports. The floor support trusses were covered with a thin film of sprayed on shotcrete, as opposed to beams imbedded in solid concrete. Even new and undamaged, they could not withstand an extended high temperature fire. I don't think we will see a tall building constructed that way again.

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Surely defense spending and unemployment are somewhat linked. Cutting defense spending would be a nasty blow to the entire economy I imagine. Sure, you could rechannel into infrastructure projects, but tell that to your soldiers and their families. It'd be an economic sedative (as opposed to a stimulus package). That said, I'm all for it. I see a governments job as helping to steer the economy, not push it from behind with it's own muscle.

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@Eorl,

Yup. That's why it would have to be approached cautiously.

The U.S. is addicted to deficit spending, which is not sustainable. It will hurt to make changes now, but it will hurt more to make changes later.

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@Robert Gentel,

"If we can't afford to be paying for fundamental social services like health care then we shouldn't be able to afford making defense contractors so wealthy and wasteful. Instead of spending such a huge chunk on hardware to kill the citizens of other countries how about spending it on keeping our own citizens alive and healthy?"

I'm very curious and concerned about what will happen with all those soldiers returning home. What about when attitudes shift and people are no longer being sent out.

Call me a bleeding heart. It sends a cold shiver down my spine thinking of what America will look like post-war with all those vets walking around and a whole slew of people in various states of shock and suffering.

It's already happening and look at how many are falling into cracks because of the lump of unemployment and economic woes that enmeshes everyone.

It all just serves to close up people in their own little worlds even more in a state of survival. That's downright scary to me. It's one thing when in the midst of it, but it's the aftermath when things start to go back to normal that the real **** will be going down.

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@Brandon9000,

Quote:

On September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases.

When someone makes this statement you really have to wonder about their agenda let alone their sanity.

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@parados,

Quote:

When someone makes this statement you really have to wonder about their agenda let alone their sanity.

I don't wonder a bit, their agenda is quite clear.

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What are your thoughts about dramatically reducing "defense" spending?

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