Capabilities and Priorities

Mark Shields in the Washington Post makes a point that's been on my mind for a while:

An America coming out of the Great Depression somehow found the leadership and the will to build and deploy around the globe 2.5 million trucks in the same period of time that the incumbent U.S. government has failed to get 30,000 fully armored vehicles to Iraq.

The Bush administration has appropriated $34.3 billion on a theoretical missile defense system -- which proved again this week to be an expensive dud in its first test in two years, when the "kill vehicle" never got off the ground to intercept the target missile carrying a mock warhead -- but has been able up to now, according to congressional budget authorities, to spend just $2 billion to armor the vehicles of Americans under fire.

They love to talk about how tough they are, and how hard they are fighting, but if you measure them against real-world results, they fail miserably.

In the three years immediately after Pearl Harbor, the United States, a nation of 132 million people with a gross domestic product of less than $100 billion, produced the following to win World War II:

• 296,429 aircraft.

• 102,351 tanks.

• 87,620 warships.

• 372,431 artillery pieces.

• 2,455,694 trucks.

Kinda makes the continuing lack of security screening equipment at airports, the missing armor in Iraq, and all the rest seem even more embarassing, doesn't it? Take a moment to read Shield's piece, he makes some other interesting points.