Rachel Maddow, I have slowly read to finish “Drift”, your book is an eye-opening, sometimes eye-popping, look at the military in the US from Eisenhower forward. You seem to suggest that we go to war more easily than ever before. That we may be shading the war powers act and we are way out on a limb regarding the use of a privatized augmentation to our standing forces.
The
last part was the most dramatic. As an aside I ask you, (How important
to Americans was the freedom of information act?) Miss-placed, lost,
and unguarded nuclear weapons, and exploded dirty bombs. Your final
sentence says it all. I am paraphrasing now, America is a peaceable country, that's not just our inheritance, it's our responsibility.
My father is gone now, he served in the Army. My mother is 88 and she was a
waitress in a cafe in Portsmouth, NH at the shipyard during the war. Mom's brothers (four) and some of their friends were with the Army in a
Maine regiment that fought in many of the island landings in the
Pacific. My Uncle Merle got a Silver Star and three purple hearts
serving as a medic with Mark Clark in Italy, they would all like your
book. None of them liked war, none of them were conscripted. They all volunteered.
Oversight is not red tape or too restrictive a set of regulations. It has it's purpose. In an ideal congress where legislation flows and compromises on both sides occur there will be time for Congressional Oversight. First though, we need to fix congress by cleansing it of graft. De-emphasizing lobbying power. We need a debate on term limits. Then to strengthen the war powers act or interpret it better so that energized presidents can't act without congress.
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