From the Baltimore Sun.

In 2008, the Department of Defense spent $19 billion on fuel, notes Gordon Adams, the author of the new book “Buying National Security” That’s more than we spent on the entire State Department, he notes. We urgently need a larger fleet of diplomats and development professionals — Mr. Adams posits the State Department needs to grow these shoes on the ground by about 41 percent. Also needed is a significant increase in training and in the number of locally employed overseas staff. Otherwise we can’t tackle such challenges as North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change and genocide.

Obama’s budget doesn’t answer this need, instead defaulting to more U.S. boots on the ground, even though in the State of the Union the President declared, “it’s time the American people got a budget that embodies their decency.” It would be more decent to fund a real jobs program at a time when unemployment is hovering at 10 percent in most U.S. cities. More pain is ahead. The Congressional Budget Office just predicted that this year the federal budget deficit will reach $1.3 trillion; going forward, “to keep federal deficits and debt from reaching levels that would substantially harm the economy, lawmakers would have to significantly increase revenues, decrease projected spending, or enact some combination of the two,” the CBO said in its report.

“Hidden in the details will be a shocking disparity between the dollars thrown at the Department of Defense and those sent to the State Department — money to help us talk, not just shoot. Our wacky reliance on military operations over civilian-run aid and diplomacy is getting tiresome for the world, but that’s not the worst thing about it. Diplomacy at the end of a gun is very expensive.”

We could literally do anything we need to do by turning away from War to Peace. A military/homeguard/rescue force, yes we need and will have one. This behemoth however is killing us.

Coming up

Recruiting ads  and Leo Burnett

They got your number now, “he wants to do something important”.

Mike