[NGTM-1R]

You can't seriously believe that diverting any of that 62 billion would actually have helped that one person? I mean, sure, whine about the funding all you want, but the alternatives don't really exist. And for that matter, how much is getting spent proportionally on the military vs. every other damn thing? Has anyone ever looked before complaining?

[Mustang19]

How much is being spent on the military versus "every other thing"? Let's look at it another way. How long can America continue to pay off its increasing upkeep on debt?

[Mefustae]

You can't seriously believe that diverting any of that 62 billion would actually have helped that one person? I mean, sure, whine about the funding all you want, but the alternatives don't really exist. And for that matter, how much is getting spent proportionally on the military vs. every other damn thing? Has anyone ever looked before complaining?

True, that was just a knee-jerk response when I looked it up and saw it was roughly $650 billion annually. Still, do they really need to spend something like 5% of their entire GDP on the military? All i'm saying is that the Cold War is ****ing over, how about they take some of the money spent on nuclear missile polish (TM) and spend it on something like, I don't know, ending the homeless problem?

I know, I know. I'm being naive, simplistic, and downright preachy. But c'mon. Hell, just trimming the fat and getting rid of all the overflows, extra expenditures, skimming and downright corruption would free a good $50 billion from the military budget without having to get rid of anything. Of course, this links right back to the core issue from the start of the thread: The military-industrial complex. They've got their fingers everywhere, and you can be damn sure they'd fight tooth and nail to stop any attempt at either scaling back defense expenditure or even just fighting the corruption and bureaucracy that can lead to the "misplacement" of 190,000 rifles.

[Kosh]

You can't seriously believe that diverting any of that 62 billion would actually have helped that one person? I mean, sure, whine about the funding all you want, but the alternatives don't really exist. And for that matter, how much is getting spent proportionally on the military vs. every other damn thing? Has anyone ever looked before complaining?

With the total spent on our military being more like $750+ billion, I somehow think we're spending more on that than anything else. It doesn't appear that way immediately because of shady accounting tricks.

[karajorma]

First thing to notice is that it is some department in Pentagon who is missing 190000 guns, ie. not located in Iraq. This makes me think that someone in the supply has been sloppy with the pencil work. 190000 guns simply do not disappear, because of the volume they occupy for starters.

A July 2007 Government Accountability Office report concluded that as many as 190,000 weapons delivered to the Iraqi army were not accounted for and could've wound up in terrorist caches.

Terrorists that can get into the Pentagon? Well I know they managed it once but they weren't in any condition to pick up 190,000 guns at the time.

[Mika]

A July 2007 Government Accountability Office report concluded that as many as 190,000 weapons delivered to the Iraqi army were not accounted for and could've wound up in terrorist caches.

Read it correctly. Conditional is used to signify that this may or may not have happened. The sentence doesn't automatically mean they have been lost. It could be a reason to justify the existence of the whole office, some over enthusiastic bureaucrate candidate finding a serious error in the supply deliveries book and making a big fuss about it, even though nothing like that has REALLY happened in the ground level in Iraq. Besides, that would sound a lot more like the army I know.

Otherwise, some 190000 to-be-trained Iraqis have defected and taken their personal weapon with them. While it certainly has happened, at this scale? I don't believe it.

Mika