I think Baker is also wrong when he describes war as consisting of the killing of people who would have rather had other government jobs -- other than soldiers and sailors and pilots. I hate to bring this up, because Baker's prose is powerful, even poetic, but most people killed in war are civilians with no government jobs at all, and most of the U.S. public believes falsely that most people killed in wars are soldiers. In addition, most people killed in U.S. wars are on the other side of the wars, and most people in the United States believe falsely that U.S. casualties make up a high percentage of the casualties in U.S. wars. Even U.S. mercenaries die in U.S. wars at higher rates than U.S. military members, but the two combined make up a tiny percentage of the dead. So, I think it's important that we stop getting this wrong.
Baseless includes many tangents, all of them worthwhile. On one of them we learn that the U.S. Library of Congress microfilmed and tossed out huge amounts of priceless printed materials to make room for doing research for the U.S. Air Force -- researching targets to bomb all over the world -- all in order to help the Air Force cheat a rule on how many civilians it could employ. The Library of Congress was militarized to do work now rendered superfluous by Google Maps, and that work alone ought to cause us to rethink U.S. government priorities. The ability of the U.S. military to buy off other government agencies as needed is just one reason to move huge truckloads of funding out of it and into decent things.
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