Time to Reallocate Missile Defense $'s to Study Abroad in China $'s

Oregon needs money to send high school students to study abroad in China for a month or two each summer. 1,650 Oregon high school students (about 5% of a graduating class) could spend a month in China in the summer living with a Chinese family and studying Mandarin for about $5 million. A similar national program sending 165,000 students to China for a summer month would cost $500 million. This is the new world our next generations will live in. This should be a funding priority.

I know where to get the money. Oregon will not have it. The economy is in a dive and tax revenues are dropping. The budget battle in the 2009 legislature will be brutal. So let’s reallocate federal dollars from missile defense to a national study abroad in China program. Let’s take a small part of the mostly wasted $13 billion per year (here) being spent on missile defense and invest it in our next generations. Having many in our next generations know China and speaking Mandarin will contribute more to our national security than the missile defense system. On the value of the missile defense system, I agree with defense analyst and international strategist Tom Barnett: (here and here)

After spending vast sums, America now fields missile defense sites in Alaska and California that even ardent program defenders admit are rudimentary.

If the envisioned program is completed deep into the next decade, missile expert Scott Ritter estimates the total cumulative cost could top a trillion dollars.

In return, we'll own a missile defense network easily overwhelmed by any major attack theoretically launched by Russia or China and one easily fooled by even a minor attack mounted by a North Korean-sized entity.

Of course, none of that would matter whatsoever because America's invulnerable ability to strike back and totally decimate potential attackers would dominate any regime's decision-making.

Such capability would nonetheless be useless in the face of the most likely threat we face: a nuclear device smuggled into the United States and detonated by terrorists.

 

Comments

[pandora]

After spending vast sums, America now fields missile defense sites in Alaska and California that even ardent program defenders admit are rudimentary.

[christian louboutin]

In return, we'll own a missile defense network easily overwhelmed by any major attack theoretically launched by Russia or China and one easily fooled by even a minor attack mounted by a North Korean-sized entity.

[louboutin]

Of course, none of that would matter whatsoever because America's invulnerable ability to strike back and totally decimate potential attackers would dominate any regime's decision-making.

[christian louboutin sale]

Such capability would nonetheless be useless in the face of the most likely threat we face: a nuclear device smuggled into the United States and detonated by terrorists.

[Pandora Charms]

Oregon needs money to send high school students to study abroad in China for a month or two each summer. 1,650 Oregon high school students