Military Spending

Two generals of the Army’s views on bloated Pentagon spending: They are Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

MacArthur: “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continual stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil … to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The Pentagon has been spending money like a drunken sailor. This must stop. Now.

Michael E. Peterson, Eugene