One Extra Troop for Every 17 Yards

I came up with this statistic through a quick calculation a few days ago.

If every American soldier came home from abroad -- where they are mostly on assignments that range from useless to counterproductive -- and was put to work on the U.S.-Mexico border, we'd have one extra soldier to patrol every 17 yards of border. Seems like that should suffice to get comfortable visual coverage of the whole area.

To reach that figure, just divide the number of yards in the border (about 3.4 million) by the number of US troops stationed abroad (a bit over 200,000, according to Wikipedia).

You don't need to look much further than that one statistic to see that our leaders are more interested in protecting foreign countries than U.S. soil.

Just to clarify, I don't have a problem in principle with the judicious use of U.S. power abroad. My position is that our leaders are not capable of the requisite judiciousness. So let's bring the boys home until we have a generation of leaders who are.