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Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

Today "Defense Budget" is an euphemism, it should be called "Attack Budget", or "Ministry of War" budget, like it was in the past.

US is today the main aggressor in the world, what China an Russia are doing by economic treaties, the US is using force alone. Afganistan, Iraq, Libia, Siria.

US is trying to force people in the world to keep using the petrodollar, but they had abused so much their power(printing it like crazy and exporting inflation and poverty to other countries), that the rest of the world is looking for alternatives, and they will find them.

All empires try to sustain past glories by force, from the Spanish empire in Nederlands to British Empire in India, Germany(France) and Japan(in China) before WWII. But empires come and go.

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It's sad that so many people don't even realize that US wants to "maintain the peace" by going to war. It's basically the same excuse that's been used by empires for millennia.

There could be so many solutions that could be used to cure the root cause of attacks against US, but most of them are completely unacceptable to the people running the military in US, and the MIC. Their solution is always war and destroying those that oppose them (even if that "solution" creates even more problems in the long term for the security of US).

It's the same problem with the NSA, which is run by an army general, who just happens to be not-amusingly nicknamed "Emperor Alexander". Instead of thinking that in order to make the Internet infrastructure in US secure by default (including banks, and whatever institution they tend to use in their arguments), they think that they need to have access to everything themselves, through loopholes, and they say that's what will keep the US infrastructure safe - when in fact they're just making it less secure. But that's okay, because it just means they get to ask for "bigger budgets to fix it", just like the military gets to ask for bigger budgets, after they create more terrorists with drone assassinations, double taps, and signature strikes.

Most empires don't start out that way. In many cases those nations were abused prior, or invaded. Usually while maintaining a shell of a military. What they learned by experience is...If you don't want someone to take a shot at you, kill you, pillage the village, and rape your women, more or less hell on earth, you have to crush everyone. This is axiomatic because of human nature. Someone somewhere will not play ball and be civil. Someone somewhere will cause massive damage to you and your livelihood if you give them the chance. You may not have met them, but they certainly exist.

There is wisdom in this laconic phrase: Si vis pacem, para bellum

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