I don't understand why you say we can stop him with sanctions today but couldn't 6 years ago. You seem to say on one hand they won't work but maybe they will? Which is it MLU? You can't have it both ways. Whether Putin is pyschotic or not doesn't mean he will act unless he thinks he can succeed. He was apparently in enough control of himself to cede power under the constraints of the Russian constitution. He is smart and trained to evaluate risk & reward. Right now he has been silent as he may be evaluating our response (the EU, US, Ukraine etc) to his current action and threats to eastern Ukraine. Even the crazy leaders of North Korea are constrained by outside influence. To think he wouldn't/won't be is more than naive...it is dangerous as that means there is nothing between letting have his way and war. You have no idea what the effect of early action would be (either do I). It is speculation and what these forums are for. However we do know what allowing Putin to think he could do what he wanted without response led to.
You're right Red each side takes turn bashing the opposing president's vacation spending etc. In fact those arrangements are out of any president's hands. The secret service had taken over all the power and responsibility. Todays presidents live in a bubble and whether on a ranch in Texas or artha's Vinyard the cost is borne by the taxpayer and cost is little changed. The defense budget is bloated and out of control. We have no real strategic vision of what the defense of the country requires that isn't diverted by the Military Industrial Complex and congressional politics. For example the F-35 fighter will be a disaster but has products from all 50 states so will not be killed as it should. We are still building M1A1 tanks even though the ARmy has over a thousand in storage. We aretaking money from veterans hospitals and support to fund some of these useless toys and no one can or will stop them. Both Military and civilian (congressional) government employees jump from gov't service to high paid contractors' jobs and create a never ending flow of business justiified or not. We need a Churchill or Rumsfeld in defense. FYI when Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty before WWI he made such significant changes in the British Navy that the whole face of naval warfare was change. He started the Royal Navy air arm invested in oil turbine engines for ship and big gun technology. He also totally revamped naval tradions and SOP that when challenged by the sea lords (admirals) that he was ruining tradition he said "Tradition what tradition rum and sodomy are the only traditions I see" (something like that). Rumdfeld before he got hung up in Iraq was doing a similar thing with the US military. What would hae happend is unknown but he at least had the balls to face up to the generals & MIC.
In general, I agree, but with some caveats on your examples. It takes decades to design and develop a new fighter. The F-35 must be maintained because we have no other alternatives. It's a very good plane, just more expensive than it should have been, largely from trying to make one plane meet the needs of three services. It is now in production and must be kept flying because the F-15's and F-16's it is replacing are being scrapped rapidly as they reach the ends of their airframe lives. It is true that the army has all of the M-1 tanks it needs right now. Mostly the General Dynamics tank factory is refurbishing older M-1's to the latest standard but makes a few new tanks to keep the factory open because Congress had indicated a need for new tanks starting in five years or so and low-rate production in the meantime is cheaper than shutting down the production and having to start it up again. Mostly the army is making Honeywell engines and Allison transmissions and a few other replacement components to maintain existing tanks because the loss of these key suppliers would make it impossible to re-start full-scale production. Shane will be the first to tell you that the VA system is socialized medicine at its worst and badly needs replacement. The new Health Law could go a long way towards doing this, by providing insurance to veterans that they can take to the private-sector doctors and hospitals of their choice. The best and most modern VA hospitals themselves could then be mothballed with maintenance staffs against future wartime casualty needs. The crummy ones could be demolished. I think nothing will change until lobbying is made illegal and campaign contributions from defense industries limited. Congress is the real problem, they put their state industry above the best interests of the country. The chummy revolving door between the defense industry and high Pentagon officials is a problem, too.
This technology has been around for decades, they are just beginning to find workarounds to its long list of troublesome problems. The worst is that it consumes huge amounts of electrical power that must be high current, sustained and controlled over a useful amount of time. Currently there is only one class of navy ship that can generate this kind of power, the Zumwalt class destroyers (all 3 of them). Next is that the system produces huge recoil forces that must be dealt with by using large, and very strong mechanisms akin to the largest gun systems of the 1940's. Third is that the rails themselves suffer a great amount of wear and damage and require frequent replacement. The early rails could only fire once before a complete overhaul. Fourth is that they generate a very large amount of heat energy that must be dissipated or cause melting of equipment, decreased safety of personnel, and detection by enemy forces. This requires very high-tech materials that are costly and difficult to obtain. There are always tradeoffs.
Pro-russian forces, who Putin himself admitted were made up of Russian military members, are not giving up their grab on Gov't buildings throughout E. Ukraine... so where's this deal that we were led to believe was going to ease the tensions?
