The 2001 9/11 attack delivered a psychological shock to the United States from which we have yet to recover. We felt secure before that day. Afterwards, we felt insecure. Much of what we have done since then has been to recapture that lost sense of security.

Among other things, military spending has more than doubled. The actual Defense Department baseline budget has gone from $308 billion in 2001 to $534 billion this coming year, but to that number has to be added another $130 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” and another $350 or so billion for defense-related expenditures not in the DOD budget, and you end up with a cool trillion in real military spending.

We outspend the entire rest of the world combined. Chop out our major allies (UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Israel) and we out-spend the rest of the world over one and a half times. China is in the midst of a major build-up. We outspend them by between seven and nine times.

Yet we do not feel secure.

Consider the case of the navy. We have actually reduced the size of the navy in the last ten years. As Secretary of Defense Gates observed last year, “As much as the U.S. Navy has shrunk since the end of the Cold War, for example, in terms of tonnage, its battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined—and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners.”

Consider the case of carriers. Our …

Today is the 179th birthday of the French Foreign Legion, one of the more interesting and romanticized military units in history. And if anyone deserves to be romanticized, La Legion probably does. From its earliest days its ranks have included that strange blend of criminals, exiles, failures, and idealists who somehow manage to come together under a foreign flag and accomplish the near-impossible for their adopted country.

The Legion’s current strength is 7,699 officers and men in eleven “regiments,” which is to say eleven separate commands each of about battalion strength. These include infantry engineers, paratroopers, light armor, and various training and support commands. Here’s a link to the Legion’s official page.

The use of the term “men” as opposed to “enlisted personnel” is deliberate. The Legion is and always has been a male-only club, with one notable exception: Susan Travers.

Travers was a young British woman who drove an ambulance and then a staff car for the Free French in World War Two. She became the lover and driver of General Pierre Koenig, commander of the 1st Free French Brigade, shared the siege of Bir Hachiem with the brigade, and drove the lead vehicle in the night break-out through the German lines. Once the column reached British lines, they counted eleven bullet holes in her car. She later drove a self-propelled tank destroyer in Italy and France and was wounded when her vehicle was disabled by a mine.

After the war she submitted a formal application to join the Foreign Legion and listed her experience during …

In previous blogs I’ve talked about the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and funding decisions on their development and procurement. Here are some links to articles on the two potential rivals to these aircraft, one in development by the Chinese and one in joint development by Russia and India.

First, here’s a link to a rundown on the Russian program. It’s a good article, but take a look at the comments as well for a very informed and informative debate. I don’t agree with all of it, and you may or may not either, but so what? Thoughtful people get to disagree.

Next, here are two articles about the Chinese project. It’s a little further down the road, so trying to foresee what the aircraft will look like has a lot to do with how the predictor views China. The China Brief piece has some nice survey results from Global Times on what Chinese readers think about China’s aerospace needs and priorities.

Chine Brief

Flight Global

In the last twelve months there has been a string of successful arrests of potential domestic terrorists with collections of bomb-making equipment as well as illegal weapons arsenals, in at least one case including antitank rockets. All were in possession of ideological tracts or videos of terrorist organizations. In the last twelve months, individuals associated with these domestic groups have murdered six law enforcement officers and several alleged plots to assassinate the President of the United States have been thwarted and its conspirators arrested.

And none of these were Islamic extremists. These were all members of militant right-wing extremist anti-government groups.

There have been domestic terror threats from Islamic extremist groups as well. The May shooting of two US servicemen in Little Rock, AK (in which one died), the thwarted alleged attacks on the Air National Guard in Newbury, NY and on Fort Dix, NY, and other alleged attacks and planned attacks in the last year by domestic Islamic extremists are nothing to sneeze at.

But prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the overwhelming source of domestic terror attacks and deaths in the United States had been from the militant right. In the last twelve months the number of extremists and militant right-wing organizations, and the number of attacks planned and actually launched by their members, has increased dramatically. Here is a link to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the alarming growth of these hate groups. Their memberships dwarf the numbers in domestic Islamic anti-government …

For decades there has been a clear fault line in western economic theory between “sweet-water” and “salt-water” economists. The names derive from the geography of their centers of power: the salt-water economists are based in universities on the two coasts of the United States. The sweet-water economists count the University of Chicago as their Mecca, where for years Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, lord high priest of monetarism and champion of the self-regulating free market, reigned supreme. The bi-coastal salt-water economists followed the path of  John Maynard Keynes, and their newly emerged leader is Nobel laureat Paul Krugman.

The salt-water school is interested in a blend of fiscal and monetary policy and supportive of the idea that government needs to regulate markets to obtain maximum benefit for society. The sweet-water school, on the other hand, has long championed the notion that government should stay out of markets because they were regulated sufficiently by a concept called My Imaginary Friend.

I’m sorry. Did I say that out loud? I meant, of course, The Invisible Hand. You may remember from a previous column of mine that the Invisible Hand is a concept which Adam Smith, in the massive 378-thousand words of his master work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, mentions exactly once, and which has since been preached as the central argument of The Wealth of Nations. It’s not, but that’s almost beside the point.

This central argument, as it is now articulated, is that if everyone in a market …

There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
At the end of the ride,
           She was inside,
And the smile graced the face of the tiger.

As we’ve talked about here before, Iran has lavished considerable time and resources on dealing with the rising tide of unrest represented by the Green Movement. Central to suppressing the Green Movement has been the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has gained new powers and considerable technological resources to enable it to support the regime. But those assets may also make it able to supplant the regime.

Is the government in Tehran riding a tiger?

The United States government thinks so, as Secretary of State Clinton made clear in a speech in Qatar Monday. Iran may be in the grip of a “creeping coup” by the Guard Corps, one which the central government is blinded to by its preoccupation with the protest movement. If so, Iran is in for some bad times.

Here is a report on Clinton’s speech.

The X-27B, a smaller unmanned version of the orbital shuttle funded by the military budget and built at the Boeing Phantom Works in Southern California, has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center and is being prepped for its first launch, scheduled for April. You may not have heard about this program — after all, it’s mostly secret — but it began life as a NASA manned spaceflight program and then in 2004 morphed into a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) unmanned orbital drone project.

Here’s a link to read more about it.

This past week the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan passed the 1,000 mark. Over a third of those deaths took place last year, by far the bloodiest year of the war. With 54 U.S. service people dead in the first two months of 2010, we are on track for another near-record year, but you really can’t tell what’s going to happen down the road based on the last month. Things could get much better. They could get a lot worse. It’s going to be a critical year, no doubt about it.

Of course, Americans aren’t the only ones dying there. Of every 10 Coalition combat deaths in Afghanistan, 60% (1007) are U.S., 15% (266) are British, and the remaining 25% (394) are divided among 24 other Coalition nations. Among the other nations, Canada has the highest death toll (140) followed by France (40). Afghan casualties are hard to pin down, but the UN estimates somewhat over 6,000 civilian deaths to date.

Here’s a link to a detailed breakdown of coalition casualties in Afghanistan.

On a related note, eight U.S. service personnel have died so far in Iraq this year. That’s about eight more than I’m comfortable with, but it’s a big improvement over a year ago.

And on a personal note, Let me congratulate my friend Timothy Broome on celebrating his 22nd year in military service and his safe return from a tour in Iraq. Welcome home, pal, and thanks for your service.