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It is not the military budget which is the major goblin at the door, it is the SUM of all government spending.

However you can not deny the $6,000,000,000,000 spent is middle-east wars in last 2 decades is a TOTAL WASTE. Without those wars and nation building, our debt would be $6 Trillion smaller.

"However you can not deny the $6,000,000,000,000 spent is middle-east wars in last 2 decades is a TOTAL WASTE. Without those wars and nation building, our debt would be $6 Trillion smaller."

Sorry entropy12, I guess we'll just have to disagree. It does matter. We wouldn't have spent 6 trillion or whatever it is but we would have spent a lot of money. For that we get a lot of bang for our buck. I've explained a lot of this over the past couple days so I don't even want to rehash that. I reject the Ron Paul foreign policy wing of the Republican party. The one that wants to conduct foreign policy like it's 1800 when we were a fledgling country. The principles are the same as 1800, but the mission has changed. See one of my Post WWII order post. I actually like the model we are moving towards truly. It's closer to the British Empire of the 18th century model. That is to have a smaller active duty force and a larger reserve force. We have more and more guard and reserves being activated than ever. This accomplishes the mission and saves us a tremendous amount of money. The new blended retirement system that has been implemented this year is projected to save a lot in retirement cost and will actually benefit more service members as they will have something for retirement even if they don't do 20 or more years.

In short, I am with you about tackling our budget deficit which will tackle our debt. We have to attack the true drivers of this to really get at the problem. Unfunded mandates. Our gutless congressmen won't tackle it.