On this day in 1953, American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero just three months into his term in the White House, addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Here’s part of what he said that day:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
The details and costs have changed somewhat, but this testimony is still true, over 70 years later. I am no pacifist; this side of the eschaton, modern heavy bombers are sometimes necessary. I’m glad we have good ones, and I’m glad to see us use them when necessary. Given the timing of this post, let me be very clear that I’m glad to see our fighters, bombers, and rockets in the air in the latest iteration of our millennium-and-a-half-long struggle against state-sponsored Islamist threats to the world. Deus vult!
(Yes, I know where that comes from. Yes, I mean it. No, we don’t get everything right; nobody does. No, I’m not embarrassed to associate with Christians who defend the world from Islamist conquest; why would I be? In 1400 years of conflict so far, they’ve held back the tide admirably. The worst you can say about them is that they sometimes stoop to acting the way Islamists act all the time.)
But I can be glad (on balance) that we’re paying the costs while keeping my eyes open about those costs. Until all the nations of the earth come to terms with the fact that Someone already hung on that cross for us, we will keep paying.
Compared to bombers, missionaries are cheap. Let’s fund some.
Posted by Tim Nichols 
Full Contact Christianity 