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The military bloated beauracracy is a perfect example of (as you said) why centralized planning doesn’t work. The difference between the military and say the Social Security Administration is that one is tasked by the constitution as a job of the federal government. The other was a re-election give away by FDR.

I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of the waste, fraud and abuse in the military. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at it. Just means we have to have realistic expectations. It’s sort of the necessary evil to put up with the national defense of our country. There’s no reason to put up with it at the department of education. Something we don’t need at the federal level...

Teufel Hunden, we're on the same page, I think, about the primary duty of the government being the defense of its people. Government waste is unavoidable because the government doesn't work in a capitalist free market economy once it becomes enough of a player in the economy to dominate significant sectors of the economy.

If we want modern examples of free enterprise and capitalism in the economy, look at al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and similar insurgent movements. Even our contractor operations — Blackwater, for example — really look more like an Obamacare single-payer medical system than like a free enterprise system. (That's not an attack on Blackwater, by the way, just pointing out that anytime government creates specifications and asks companies to bid on the specs, government is so big that it not only writes the specs but in doing so changes the entire rules of the game.)

But what's the alternative? Mercenary armies selling themselves to the highest bidder? We saw the devastation that created around the end of the Middle Ages and the early part of the Reformation era, and there's no way in the world we want true free enterprise in the military. It works better, which is why the terrorists can accomplish a great deal with minimal resources against a bloated and overgrown American military, just like many small companies can outperform large corporations. However, it is far too dangerous to have large armies selling their services to the highest bidder.

One more thing — I said in a previous post that Fort Leonard Wood is no longer a basic training installation. Anyone who knows FLW will realize what I meant to say was it's no longer “ONLY” a basic training installation. We make a big point in this area of emphasizing the upper-level TRADOC mission of FLW as well as our increasing number of FORSCOM units, but obviously FLW still does a lot of basic training. That's no longer the post's primary mission, however.