Pentagon review, budget stress new threats such as cyber war

[laststeamtrain]

Source: McClatchy Newspapers / Miami Herald

Posted on Mon, Feb. 01, 2010

Pentagon review, budget stress new threats such as cyber war

By NANCY A. YOUSSEF
McClatchy Newspapers

The U.S. military is so dominant over any other nation's forces that it must pay more attention to untraditional threats such as cyber attacks, the environment and terrorist groups, including some that are working to obtain weapons of mass destruction from failing states, the Defense Department's latest quadrennial policy review has found.

The department released the Quadrennial Defense Review and its proposed $708 billion budget Monday, saying that the QDR shaped its budget request.

Although President Barack Obama promised during his presidential campaign that he wouldn't request supplemental funding to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Bush administration did routinely, Monday's budget request to Congress includes a supplemental request for $33 billion to pay for the wars through fiscal year 2010.

The administration said it needed the funding to support the deployment of an additional 30,000 to 35,000 troops to Afghanistan by this fall. In addition, the budget calls for $159 billion in contingency funding, largely to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2011, making the total defense budget $708 billion, an $18 billion increase from last year.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/1457352.html

[Hubert Flottz]

1. Guns or butter?

What would Jeebus Buy?

[lazarus]

2. Jeebus?

Some choice quotes from the peaceful Jeebus. :evilgrin:

Matthew 10:34
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Luke 12:51
Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

Luke 22:36
He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

[PacerLJ35]

3. Touche, my friend...

The Bible does indeed contradict itself, but before you try and put things out of context, I present this passage:

1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

[No Elephants]

17. LOL, I guess "touche" was a nicer way to say it than "bullshit," which I used.

[No Elephants]

14. With all due respect, bullshit! Those verses have been pulled totally out of

context.

If you actually read the chapters from which those verses are pulled, you will see that he was not talking about physical or physical fighting. For example, Matthew 10 is about how following him (Jesus) would cause divisions in families. Well, duh. If your family is Jewish or worshipping Zeus, yes, following Jesus will cause a division. Ditto, if your family is greedy, warmongering, or whatever. And no, he was not urging people to kill their parents and siblings with a sword. Spiritual and/or ideological warfare was being referred to, not physical warfare.

Jesus used a lot of literary devices that you've encountered elsewhere-hyperbole, metaphor, parables, etc. Pretending his was literally talking about war is either uninformed or deceptive. Either way, it's wrong.

I pointed that out to a poster here once whose screen name I do not recall at the moment. S/he had pulled a verse out of context from an atheist website. If you are that same poster, I have less than zero respect for what you are trying to pull. If not, I'll just assume for now that you've been deceived--unless I see your screen name (Lazarus) on something like this again. In which case, you'll be dead to me for a lot longer that three days.

P.S. I posted this before seeing that Pacer had pointed out that you were pulling things out of context. Good. So many people rely on the fact that most people have no clue what the Bible actually does and does not say and think they can just throw anything out there without being called on it.

[bemildred]

19. It deserves to be mentioned that a lot of what is attributed to Jeebus is not really Jeebus.

The New Testament is a hodge-podge of inventions, modifications, and interpretations, with a smidgen of stuff that might have actually been said by Jeebus.

[No Elephants]

21. Not relevant in this context. The posts had nothing to do with how the

Bible came to be (OT or NT, btw), or even whether Jesus ever lived or not. Nor was the issue Judaism vs. Christianity.

The discussion involved one poster posting Bible verses of words attributed to Jesus to imply falsely that Jesus loved war, combat, etc., rather than peace.

It wouldn't matter if the poster had pulled stuff out of context from the Brothers Grimm to portray Cinderalla falsely. And, in that case, it also would not matter if the version of Brothers Grimm that the poster used was the original words of the brothers or whether only a bastardized version of their words had come down to us over time, as long as we were all working from the same version (more or less).

Bottom line: pulling stuff out of context from whatever source to give a false impression is either posting mindlessly or posting with an intent to deceive. That was the point--and the only point of my post.

So, no, in that context, it was not meritorius, or even relevant, to mention issues that more properly belong in a discussion of history, Bible history or Judaism v. Christianity or any issue like that.

Your issue belongs in an entirely different discussion than the one in which Lazarus and the posters who responded to Lazarus were having. But, since you brought it up, I have more than a passing familiarity with Bible history. It just had nothing to do with Lazarus's post. Maybe it had something to do with Lazarus's unspoken agenda, but not with Lazarus's actual post.

[bemildred]

24. Well, I often mention things that I find interesting.

I don't think much about relevance unless I'm having an argument, which was not the case here.

[lazarus]

22. Bullshit right back atcha

I'm responding to you and not Pacer because Pacer was polite.

I've read the Bible through 2 times, reading it a third right now. I've read the Gospels multiple times. I pulled nothing out of context. BTW, if Jesus was so peaceful, what were the Disciples doing with swords in the Garden of Gethsemane? And how peaceful was he being when he took the whip to the money changers in the temple? Real peaceful guy.

Just because you can pick and choose any interpretation of the Bible you want doesn't mean that interpretations you don't like are less valid. The ability to pick and choose actually makes the whole thing less valid. So go ahead and let me be dead to you, or put me on ignore, or whatever you need to do to keep up your obviously fragile faith.

[PacerLJ35]

23. It probably wouldn't be unusual for most males in Judea to have some kind of sword/knife

Those weren't the cushiest of times...thieves, etc were abundant.

Out of the entire new testament, there was only one example of Jesus losing his temper, and that was in the temple. Ditto really with the apostles and swords...the vast bulk of the new testament is focused on redemption, humility, loving your neighbor, helping the poor and understanding the general human condition. It's not really a collection of discussions promoting violence, as your general position implies.

Try to look at the actions of the apostles and Jesus through the context of living in that era, some 2,000 years ago. They weren't preaching at malls in suburbia and traveling via SUV on the interstate...times were rough, and violence was commonplace. The fact that they had some measure of defense isn't surprising. That was a time when the idea of beating the snot out of your wife was accepted, and children weren't adored centers of attention in the family, rather they were along the bottom of the priority list for most and weren't given much value. The fact that Jesus healed women, let women mingle with him, and paid such attention to children, the poor and the sick, is a testament to who he really was...he centered his attention on those who weren't really wanted, the outcast and the unimportant. He broke with traditional Jewish thought in such a radical way he was thought of as a troublemaker and worse.

[No Elephants]

13. Um, neither?

[bemildred]

4. So they are saying:

1.) Conventional war is a very expensive waste of time
2.) So they want to be paid even more for protecting us from things that don't fit the model of warfare at all: drugs, computer hacking, identity theft, political demonstrations, etc.

In other words, it's all about keeping those good-paying taxpayer funded jobs.

[PacerLJ35]

5. No, not really

Cyber hacking is a very real military threat. It's not about consumer identity theft protection, etc. It's about investing technology to defend against hackers gaining access to our defense networks, which hold lots of stuff they'd like to read/know (an intel boon), not to mention an easy way to kill/disrupt defense structure, making a US response difficult or confused. Additionally, they could hack into the nation's communications or power structure and cause blackouts and comm failures.

If a nation figures that out, any conventional war could be very quickly decided, and not in our favor.

[tammywammy]

6. +1, you're exactly right

There are constant cyber attacks on the defense industry.

[bemildred]

7. Bullshit.

If we don't connect our defense networks to the internet, there is diddly squat that "hackers" can do hack into them. And anybody that lets our military networks becomes accessible to outside hackers is incompetent and should be shot, or at least fired.

[PacerLJ35]

8. Sigh...sure, whatever

Apparently you don't know how these systems really operate. They aren't "internet sites" that you or I can access by typing in the good 'ol WWW address. But they are connected between various communication nodes and the bad guys have pretty sophisticated means to gain access. I'm not talking about hacking into your online bank account. This is high-tech stuff, and it's not just strictly defense-related stuff. I'm talking about the US power grid, GPS satellite systems, and various communications systems.

[bemildred]

10. I spent 21 years working on exactly these technologies and systems.

I know exactly what I am talking about, do you? The only issue is where they are using various forms of electromagnetic broadcast networking, and then you have to ask why, in a military network, they don't use adequate encryption? Is security-through-obscurity good enough? Why assume all your enemies are going to be incompetent?

[PacerLJ35]

12. I don't know if you still work in that industry

But they've been really ramping up this cyber-security stuff over the past few years...to the point that even on our NIPR networks it's almost too much of a pain in the ass to log in...

[bemildred]

15. Well, I sympathize, I mean I've been there.

But I think it's bullshit, and it's what I did, I have degrees, experience, I got to "architect" some of that sort of thing. It was all about marketing and profit and the grunts could make do with whatever it turned out to be. Bad design, incompetent programming, it all winds up collecting dust on a shelf somewhere, that's OK. I mean how are you going to fight a war lugging around 30 pounds of batteries? What are you going to give up? Food? Ammo? Water? It's moronic.

[bemildred]

16. The basic point, from my point of view, is this:

Any fielded military information system can and should be un-hackable. It is not a poorly understood problem.

[PacerLJ35]

9. PS- There is some internet connectivity

Primarily for non-critical systems like scheduling stuff and other information sites the DoD uses to allow personnel to access for a variety of reasons. For example, if I want to fly to a certain airfield I can get online and download an airfield survey, or I can access the notices for airmen website, or various weather websites. We even have Microsoft Outlook exchanges for our work email, which is also connected to the normal internet. But the Chinese or any other enemy accessing those sites isn't really what they are concerned with. The really critical stuff isn't on a typical WWW connection (what we refer to as a NIPR website). All the classified and critical stuff is stored on separate systems (see the other post) that we can't access from a simple computer.

[bemildred]

11. Please see post #10. nt

[No Elephants]

18. I don't care if someone protects us from certain things, as long as 40 agencies aren't duplicating

the effort. But I have a feeling they are.

As far as keeping the jobs, as long as there is no duplication, I don't mind. And maybe it goes under the "defense" budget because that is the easiest budget to get passed.

[bemildred]

20. Well, actual defense of the USA and it's citizens is OK with me too.

In a reasonable way that recognizes that absolute security is not to be had and that infinite expense to resolve miniscule threats is a bad bargain.