What's irritating is the article writer let that go by, and it was even more irritating when you quoted it without any alarms going off. This is not the only example, just an obvious one.

People have to have some skepticism about what they read or hear, particularly when it's so blatant.

When I read it, I thought $1 trillion could have been a typo. I gave the reporter that much slack. My first response was to find the source, which given the details in the article took about three minutes. It should be everyone's first response when statistics and facts come up that don't make sense. That's the "thinking" part. The alternative is what usually happens: we end up with ten thousand links on the internet about a fighter wing, a combat team, and two battalions being eliminated to save a trillion dollars. Kind of like that Lincoln quote.

The truth is that the paper mentioned describes huge numbers of military cuts, which when all added up comes up to $960 billion (close enough to a trillion). Some of the ideas in the paper are good ones. Many aren't. But we all know that Defense is one of the Big Three in government, and should not be off the cutting table.

Note that despite Frank being the front man, the paper itself is the result of the cooperation between liberals and "no foreign entanglement" libertarians from the right.