Once again we rise to the occasion to illustrate how adroit we are at being political partisan grunts as we stand on the political/ethnic divide an hurl verbal bombs at each other to the detriment of an apt understanding of what constitute the issue.
As a matter of fact, the amount spent on the military here is nominal. What amazes me is comparatively speaking it is more than we spend on agriculture for example or allocate to regional administrations for their upkeep. That being said, the military is more than the chocolate cream parade ground ready soldiers and include the coast guard, search and rescue and emergency evacuation personnel. The money is not going mainly to salary but to fund these areas.
The coast guard needs patrol boats. One of these is some four million or more. They need helicopters able to search for people missing in our coastal zones and now that we are becoming an oil economy need very large ones for medical evacuations and other heavy lift emergency.
The lacking here is the information as to the line item breakdown of what is allocated to what areas. If we do that we will see that this funding is grossly impoverished given our serious need.
Like most of you I was concerned that the allocations were "too much". On reflection one quickly sees it is too little given what constitute allocations for our security forces.