Ordinarily, I have to force myself to read any column with a headline like "U.S. Needs to Get Serious About Defense Spending." But sometimes, a column is different. Special.

Sometimes, a column with a headline like that also has a line like "Every dollar spent on health benefits for retirees is a dollar we can't spend training and equipping men and women to deal with the Islamic State, Putin and other threats." And I think to myself: Yes. This is the good shit.

This is the militarist thesis behind Charles "Chuck" Lane's Washington Post op-ed Wednesday, which appeared in my RSS as it appears above (sans bald eagle, Constitution, and flag, but I think they're pretty implicit). The basic gist is that we need to spend more on military buildup, like, now, but we can't because of socialist-style health care for our veterans:

As the United States' defense budget shrinks relative to its economy, more and more of it is destined to purposes that have little, or nothing, to do with deterring or, if necessary, winning wars in the here and now.

The CBO reported in January that the Defense Department's health care costs will rise from $49 billion in 2014 to $70 billion in 2028 (in inflation-adjusted dollars). That is an increase of about 40 percent in real terms; as a result, health care will account for 11 percent of the defense budget in 2028, up from an already astounding 9 percent today.

Yes, it truly is astounding. Astounding is the word you're looking for when you realize that, even 14 years from now, the military might dedicate slightly more resources than it currently does to make medicine eminently affordable for Americans who helped build the military with 20 or more years of their lives.

Note also the weaselly math in Lane's paraphrasing of the CBO's numbers: Health care costs will balloon by 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. And yet, as a share of the total defense budget, they'll only grow by 2/9, or 22 percent, perhaps because the rest of the defense budget will be growing by so much more. Which would sort of undercut his thesis. Much as when he opens his column with several paragraphs of ALARM! on how U.S. defense spending is plummeting as a share of GDP, then later admits: "Fact is, the share of GDP that the United States or any other country devotes to its defense budget is at best a symbolic indicator." Eh?

Lane complains that these retirement entitlements have become political sacred cows, and he's right. Retirement entitlements should be scared cows. People who have dedicated themselves to labor for an institution for at least two decades—usually the best, spryest two decades of their lives—deserve to be taken care of by that institution. It's a pathetic fact that pensions and real health benefits for retirees have gone the way of the dodo practically everywhere but in government civil service. And it's not as if private businesses' preferred alternative—investment accounts—is treating retirees better, or even anywhere near as well, as pensions do.

On the other hand, Lane is right that military pensions and retirement health costs are growing, and it's fair to be at least a little concerned about managing the expense. In this, he's echoing the parade of CEOs and CFOs who have advised Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon successors to cut costs and run the DOD like a business. Where would we ever possibly find another $30 billion or so over the next decade to fund military retirement benefits? Where, I ask you?

(Reuters) - The U.S. government now projects that the total cost to develop, buy and operate the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be $1.45 trillion over the next 50-plus years, according to a Pentagon document obtained by Reuters.

The Pentagon's latest, staggering estimate of the lifetime cost of the F-35 — its most expensive weapons program — is up from about $1 trillion a year ago, and includes inflation.

Nope, can't make cuts there. That sacred cow truly is sacred. We might need those planes for the Islamic State and Putin. If they ever get off the ground, that is.