Unconventional Sources

Don’t believe the hype about the 2010 Pentagon budget. Right wing hawks are running around with their arms waving, panicking about how the military’s budget has been “slashed”. They remind me of Brer Rabbit, begging not to be thrown into a briar patch.

The truth is the proposed military budget for 2010 has a 4 percent increase – billions of extra dollars being spent. If that’s what a slashed budget looks like, I would very much like my personal household budget to be slashed, please.

If you want to understand what’s really going on with the military budget, for goodness sakes don’t listen to the party line talking points. Go read the Government Accountability Office Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs, released just at the end of March – and then go see how many of the bloated, overdue, malfunctioning programs have been maintained, or even expanded, in the proposed budget.

Of all the issues of military waste, the greatest is the issue of America’s nuclear weapons. There’s no real use for our thousands of nuclear weapons, yet we continue to hold them in our nations military stockpiles, spending huge amounts of money to maintain them, to keep them ready to blast some foreign city off the face of the planet.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a worthwhile collection of articles on the problems with nuclear weapons and global security. If you care about the threat of this most deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, go take a look at what they have to say.

One of the most under-reported stories of the economic recession is the role of military waste. Trillions of dollars are poured into the creation of immense, elaborate weapons that fail to actually benefit the American people. If this amount of money had been put into areas such as sustainable energy development instead, our nation might not be in a recession today.

One site, entitled simply Military Waste, does a good job of organizing information about the immense financial, environmental and human waste organized by the Pentagon. From the outrageous out-of-date F-22 Raptor to the neglect in the weak-skinned Humvee, Military Waste pulls no punches.

Here at Unconventional Sources, we specialize in linking to actual sources of information that exist around the edges of the web. We aren’t concerned with the popular and the trendy. We’re concerned with the backwaters of merit.

However, we do actually limit ourselves to linking to places that really exist. Usually.

Today, I want to provide a link in honor of a place that ought to, but does not, exist: AntiMilitary.org.

I don’t like the military. I don’t like the ideas that it stands for, and I don’t like what it does in actualization of those ideas.

But, when I went searching for sites that oppose the military, I couldn’t really find any. On a search on Google for “anti military”, for example, all I could find were sites where the writers accused other people of being “anti military”.

The closest I could find to a genuine anti military site was the Quaker Agitator.

Why are people so afraid to simply state that they don’t like the military? Why doesn’t antimilitary.org exist? Why shouldn’t it?