US Air Force Staff Sgt. Joshua Matrine, a crew chief with the 159th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, cleans the canopy on an F-15C Eagle aircraft assigned to the Louisiana Air National Guard at Leeuwarden Air Base, Netherlands, March 28, 2017. Credit: Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder / US Air Force
When Donald Trump wanted to “do something” about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the US Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million). The strike was symbolic at best, as the Assad regime ran bombing missions from the same airfield the very next day, but it did underscore one thing: the immense costs of military action of just about any sort in our era.
While $89 million is a rounding error in the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget, it represents real money for other agencies. It’s more than twice the $38 million annual budget of the US Institute of […]
Disturbing and sad for sure.
Yes Mark R, I am disturbed by our country becoming the killers of the world instead of the peacemakers. We need to spend more money helping students become doctors, which there is a great shortage of here which one finds out as we get older and need them. We do not need to be killing people all over the world with the false justification of “spreading democracy” which is something we do not even have anymore here: we have an oligarchy of the rich, and they are greedy capitalist pigs that don’t care about human life here or in other countries.