this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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It sounds great in a world where peace is the standard, but we don't live in that world.
You want our military and DoD activities to be fully transparent? Why? So any country on earth can bend us over a couch? Yeah let's be fully transparent about what we are buying and where it's going.
It's really not. The military is a special case here as they do, in fact, having something to hide. The knowledge of their activities is kind of important for not being ambushed by our foes.
This might surprise you but most modern Military hardware is far more capable of delivering destruction than withstanding it. Whoever strikes first usually wins unless met with an overwhelming counter response. You give that away and the opportunists will do what they will do.
I'm not blind, the military industrial complex as a whole needs torn to a fraction of its current stature, but "let's just let everyone know everything and where and the cost..." is just one more populist standpoint that will end in horrible failure.
"War is a racket" will give you a better idea on how to combat the growth of the military industrial complex.
As for the CIA/NSA/FBI, yeah they should be absolutely transparent no doubt about it.
You want the FBI to be transparent when they frequently have to investigate criminals on the lowdown to get them to expose themselves?
Unless it's part of an active investigation, sure. The moment they're in cuffs it needs to come out.
Otherwise what else is the FBI doing? Probably tapping your phone or selling crack to people they want to see in legalized slavery.
Look at how much money the US spends (creates) for their military. It's more and more and more every year and we have no idea were lots of it goes towards. Then wars are milked for the military industrial complex to profit off of. Certainly some operations can be kept secret to some degree but it has gone way too far currently.
Look, im a veteran who's absolutely onboard with gutting the MI complex. Don't get me wrong. Eisenhower rang the bell on that one half a century ago and I've seen personally what war profiteering leads to.
That being said, just "tell everyone everything!" Just can't work. We'd be better off changing other things to stop the takeover of Boeing, Northrop, LM, etc. Unfortunately things that would absolutely be too drastic for our modern comfy lives, like enforcing income restrictions during wartime and changing the voting process from Congress to draftees.
I totally get what you're saying and there is certainly not a good way or one way of solving these problems. I believe that the government has no trust left to give. Just like if one person in a relationship made too many mistakes over and over to degrade trust the partner might want them to be totally transparent. While not ideal to have everything in a government transparent we are so far down the loss of trust rabbit hole that only something drastic to uproot our comfy lives needs to be taken. My ideas are certainly not perfect but we the people need to come to some consensus soon and give up some convienences for the better
It isn't so much a matter of secrecy as a lack of oversight. If they have a shitty contract awarding system it isn't secret just that no one is watching it.