COST OF WAR

There are renewed calls for America to wage war in Iraq and maybe go ahead and bomb the hell out of Syria while we're at it. There are also a handful of people who are dead keen to 'draw a line in the sand' for Putin and Russia as they carry out what must be the slowest invasion in European history in Ukraine. With that said, it is probably worthwhile to recall the staggering costs and consequences of air wars waged on ignorant savages from 30,000 feet.

Depleting stocks of Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) used by European Air Forces could soon trigger a renewed demand for these weapons, and heat up the debate of cost versus efficiency. Recent news reports from the U.S. that claimed precision munitions stocks of certain NATO members were depleting quickly were rebuffed by official responses from Britain and France, claiming their air forces could continue unaffected at current operational tempo. However, Pentagon sources insisted Washington was in talks with NATO allies to ensure a sufficient supply of munitions for the Libya bombing campaign.

I happen to think that the NATO countries that participated in bombing Libya the last time did severely deplete their stocks of precision guided munitions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they took to simply dropping dumb gravity bombs after they looked at the amount of damage they were inflicting on the enemy (none at all) and the cost to replace $300,000 weapons being used to kill the product of the most unskilled and viciously productive labor on the planet (muslim terrorists).

Every bomb we drop is the equivalent of a full-ride scholarship to Harvard and Harvard Law and each graduate of those are immensely more destructive than anything we could kill with a bomb today.

Launching a full scale bombing campaign against even more muslim terrorists in defense of other muslim terrorists strikes me as a bad idea. Not sustainable. Fiscally unsound. Stupid on the very face of it. Fighting to haul Ukraine out of the clutches of Putin strikes me as even sillier. After all, if the Ukraine was serious they'd have unleashed the kind of spoiling attacks that work wonders with Russians and yet, I haven't seen a single sign that any oil or gas pipelines feeding Western Europe with GAZPROM products has been attacked. There have been no terror attacks in Moscow or St. Petersburg. No hijackings, no skyjackings and no ugly videos other than what we have seen of the Malaysian Airliner shot down over Ukraine by Russian soldiers. A country "fighting for its survival" losing just 7 soldiers in 2 days is not really a country fighting for survival. If they won't fight for it, why would anyone else?

From now until the end of the world, if you mean to keep your liberty, you better fight for it and that means you better arm yourself. The American Expeditionary Force isn't going to launch again for another generation, maybe two. Our friends on the great China fringe better understand that too.

That's going to have some immediate near term consequences when it comes to peaceful technical powers deciding to abrogate the Nuclear Weapons policies of the last 50 years and test the limits of the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. There are more than a score of countries that can go nuclear whenever they wish. As they see the handwriting on the wall we may well see a new generation of MAD warfare along the lines of our Cold War with the USSR. I suspect a number of splendid liberal governments in the West have activated old plans to initiate nuclear weapon programs of their own. After all, our policies, put in place over the last 6 years, have made it clear to them all that the dream of collective defense and a nuclear umbrella is past and opening.

Who thought de Gaulle was prescient when he insisted on the Force de Frappe?