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You are pinning all your hopes on a retired general. Without analyzing whether he is right. That is a fallacy: Description of Appeal to Authority An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form: 1. Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S. 2. Person A makes claim C about subject S. 3. Therefore, C is true. This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious. This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert. In such cases the reasoning is flawed because the fact that an unqualified person makes a claim does not provide any justification for the claim. The claim could be true, but the fact that an unqualified person made the claim does not provide any rational reason to accept the claim as true. When a person falls prey to this fallacy, they are accepting a claim as true without there being adequate evidence to do so. More specifically, the person is accepting the claim because they erroneously believe that the person making the claim is a legitimate expert and hence that the claim is reasonable to accept. Since people have a tendency to believe authorities (and there are, in fact, good reasons to accept some claims made by authorities) this fallacy is a fairly common one. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html

This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert.

So is there any consensus as to whether this General has any expertise with respect to the subject at hand?

I would tend to think General McInerny has some knowledge in this area, and that he would not want to sully his reputation by being so dogmatic about the topic when he need not be.

My experience is that generals, in general, tend to be pretty thoughtful in their utterances, and don't typically run off at the mouth about things they don't know, and consequently they often speak with supreme confidence about that which they DO understand. One usually does not become a general otherwise. But I'm generalizing.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would expect that we would begin to see numerous other military "experts" chiming in, either backing or undermining the General's assertions.

So I ask: What other military authorities have opined on this subject, and what is their level of agreement?

You are pinning all your hopes on a retired general. Without analyzing whether he is right.

He cannot be demoted for speaking his mind. He is retired. And he probably realizes Social Security is a joke and that his pension may soon be paid with monopoly money anyway. Most of his observations coincided with mine. So to prove him wrong would me I was wrong. And I do pride myself in usually being the first to find my mistakes. We all are human though, but I am not proven wrong on this yet.