commentaries

Thank you, Becky Lourey, for this information. When only 1% of Americans are asked to sacrifice, when Pentagon contracting firms (notably Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon) make record profits while cutting 18,000 workers, when contractor-CEOs make salaries equal to Wall Street CEOs' salaries, when contractor-lobbyists petition Congress for weapons and programs which today's military neither needs nor requests, when lobbyists persuade elected officials that the Pentagon should be exempted from spending scrutiny, we see how prescient the Founders, George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower were. All of us must do all we can "to ensure that our returning veterans receive all the care necessary to recover and maintain their health." The entire nation "must establish the pathway for the skills and education our veterans gained while serving our country to be transitioned to jobs at home."

It is incumbent upon our leaders to communicate to us about the choices which they make and the policies which are being carried out in our name. Congress has entirely abandoned its role in declaring war and has abrogated its power of the purse. As a result, we have plunged into the kind of senseless foreign entanglements that George Washington advised us to avoid. Our elected representatives have capitulated to the military-industrial complex of which Dwight Eisenhower warned us. Our economic security is threatened in the name of national security--just as Dwight Eisenhower predicted it could be.

Thank you Becky to your family for the huge sacrifice your son gave to our country! Thank you for this well written and informative editorial. I hope our leaders are listening!

Thank you, Becky, for the huge sacrifice that your family has made on behalf our our country! Thank you also for pointing out that support of veterans is very different than support of the Pentagon. Many people confuse the two. I am a US Navy veteran, and I believe that much military spending has little to do with national security and much to do with making huge amounts for a few. We cannot afford to continue military spending that has little to do with national defense. We cannot continue to spend as much on the military as the next 15 highest spending countries COMBINED! We cannot continue to spend twice as much on the military as a percent of GDP as most countries. Excessive military spending is a significant cause of our national deficit. On Veteran's Day, let's agree to support veterans while trimming the bloated Pentagon budget. These two actions are not contradictory.