Star Trek

I know that the Congress controls the military budget; I also know that both the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the Republicans, which means that they're going to follow Bush. I also know that there has been some downsizing in the military since the end of the Cold War but the US military budget is still huge, its about equal to the military budget of every other country in the world combined. We still have way more than enough nukes to destroy human civilization. Our patriot missile system is, for lack of a better word, crap, and yet we are still wasting money on it. We have 30 different kinds of airplanes. The Stealth bomber alone costs $1 billion each. The Pentagon ordered 21. Were retiring billions of dollars worth of planes that havent been flown around much. The Navy has shrunk but we still maintain $80 billion worth of nuclear subs and four of the ships that were mothballed were billion dollar battleships that should have never been built because theyve been obsolete since WW2. Of course theres also our 8,000 $3 million per piece Abrams tanks. With what we paid for one Abrams, we could have taught hundreds of soldiers Arabic, so we can actually question prisoners taken during the Afghan and Iraq war instead of just leaving them to rot in jail without even knowing what their crimes were. Its good that some of the new military technologies being researched will reduce the size and cost of our military but many of the new weapons being developed are useless and costly like the missile defense shield and bunker busting nukes. Theres also the issue of military waste, which is just appalling. Book keeping and accounting in the Pentagon is simply terrible. We dont even know how much money weve spent on our nuclear weapons, it could be anywhere from $5 to $10 trillion. With so much of the money we put into the military, we simply do not know do not know how theyre spent. I probably wouldnt be complaining half as much if they only managed to get rid of waste and corruption in the military.

About collateral damage, the pentagon has released no official enemy casualty reports in recent wars. They can talk all they want about reduced casualties but every time when a human rights group releases a civilian casualty report the Pentagon completely denies their accuracy. Civilian deaths in Vietnam could have been as high as 4 million, anywhere between 100 and 200,000 in the first Gulf War, there hasnt even been any real estimate of casualties in the Kosovo war, and there could have been up to 100,000 civilian casualties in the current Iraq war but the Pentagon simply refuses to acknowledge any of those estimations. Not only that but the Pentagon has also repeated refused to do any studies on the effectiveness of new more advanced weapons at reducing civilian casualties.

Bush is getting too ahead of himself. Is he stupid enough  to believe that we could have a base on the moon by,what was the year, 2015. We don't even have a shuttle fleet up yet. And even if we did, the number of trips it would take and money it would expend would be impractical. Just to get the supplies to the moon would take years. We need to first find a more efficent propulsion system, like an ion drive a fusion reactor. Its just not possible for today's capabilities

What about antimatter - it does exist see http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop12apr99_1.htm