F-22A in a spot of bother (major report)

[Darth Wong]

You're not even arguing the same point as the people defending the F-22. They are criticising Gates for doing his job badly.

What the fuck makes you think this is all about Gates?

[Simon_Jester]

The problem here is that it's been decades since anyone in the US government actually sat down and came up with an overall geopolitical strategy for the nation that the government would stick to. And that was Cold War containment, which is now completely dead.

So we do not have a plan. Hopefully, the Obama administration will finally get around to creating a post-Cold War strategy for the US, twenty years after the fact, but for the time being we don't have one. Therefore, American foreign policy is decided by a combination of inertia, political expediency, jingoism, and short-term objectives. This has put us in a very awkward policy position.

But insofar as we do have defined national objectives, and granted that they're not very coherent, they do amount to a mission statement for the US military. And to carry out that mission statement the US does indeed need improbably expensive F-22 jets.

Do we need a better mission statement? You bet. Is it the military's job to write it? No. So the military (cheerfully) asks for the expensive weapons it needs to carry out that ambitious mission statement. And the government mostly gives it to them, because of the combination of factors above- especially political expediency and jingoism.

All this has happened before. Remember the naval arms race during the runup to World War I?
"In the end a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight."
_______

Firstly, degrading the USAF's capabilities will make no difference to the chances of another Afghanistan or Iraq occurring. Existing forces are quite sufficient to destroy such weak opponents. As has already been pointed out by several posters, diverting funds from high-tech conventional weapons to anti-insurgency forces makes such invasions more likely.

The fact that some people think so does not actually make it so. Such activities are driven by political factors, which are in turn driven by the US sense of its own massive superiority.

But the US has sent underprepared armies that did not have massive superiority into foreign wars before, as happened in Korea. The cynical interpretation of this is that the US is going to wander into needless foreign wars whether it can win them or not, so it might as well be good at fighting its way out of them.
________

Bullshit. If the conditions are such that more soldiers would die, then Americans will be more reluctant to engage. Appealing to WW2 or Vietnam is a waste of air; political conditions have changed. Back during WW2, Americans were perfectly content to restrict their entire knowledge of the war to government propaganda.

Wasn't the American public criticized for doing the exact same thing in Iraq?

If you now think that the American public is not fully willing and able to support a war that its military can't win, you are being far too optimistic about our intelligence and military competence.
______

If the world actually needs this, then perhaps other parts of the world really would step up and take over some of this role. Otherwise, why do we not consider the possibility that the world just might be able to get along without the US trying to control everything that happens in it?

Who's "we?" If "we" means "the world as a whole, or any large fraction thereof," plenty of people consider it. If "we" means "the people on this board," we're considering it right now.

If "we" means the American public or American politicians in particular, the reason "we" don't consider it is because it isn't a conscious choice on our part. But whenever we hear about something that we think is bad happening on the far side of the world, we keep thinking "Hmm. Wonder what we can do about that." And since the US is a large and rich country, the answer is almost always "we can do something." So we get in the habit of doing something, of making plans to do future somethings, and so on.

And yes, that comes from asking the wrong question- "what can we do" instead of "what should we do" or "what should we do given that we don't want to wind up overextended." Americans stopped worrying about becoming overextended after the Second World War started, and predictably, we have become badly overextended.

But since we don't actually pay our politicians to worry about twenty or thirty year time scales, fixing this is going to be (at best) an awkward, piecemeal process.

[Darth Wong]

But the US has sent underprepared armies that did not have massive superiority into foreign wars before, as happened in Korea.

Of course, since they had a massive sense of their own superiority at the time. They have maintained this sense of their own super-selves ever since, regardless of the reality. "Prestige" capabilities go a long way toward this sense.

The cynical interpretation of this is that the US is going to wander into needless foreign wars whether it can win them or not, so it might as well be good at fighting its way out of them.

That's utter bullshit. There's no way Americans will go into wars regardless of whether they think they will win. They go into wars because they are enormously confident that they will win, and win very easily. That's the attitude they have, and you know perfectly well that this is why they blundered into Iraq. Part of this confidence today stems from their great confidence in the superiority of their high-tech weapon systems. In the past, it stemmed from their nuclear arsenal (even though they couldn't actually use it for various reasons) or the simple fact that the memory of WW2 was fresh and they had recently won a major war against a much more formidable opponent.

A bloodied nose can greatly reduce their aggressiveness. After Vietnam, they were much more cautious. Most of their foreign interventions were very small. Even Gulf War 1 was conducted very cautiously, with limited goals and the careful assembly of a genuine international coalition (unlike the joke "coalition of the willing" in 2003). But the more proud they get of their technological superiority, the more confident they are in their ability to crush their enemies and start wars, even stupidly open-ended ones like the "Global War on Terror".

[Simon_Jester]

The cynical interpretation of this is that the US is going to wander into needless foreign wars whether it can win them or not, so it might as well be good at fighting its way out of them.

That's utter bullshit. There's no way Americans will go into wars regardless of whether they think they will win. They go into wars because they are enormously confident that they will win, and win very easily.

You missed my point.

It is entirely possible that Americans will be confident that they will win a war that they cannot win. That is the sense in which you are grossly overestimating the intelligence and military competence of the American public- by assuming that we are good at judging which wars are winnable and avoiding those which are not. This is not true. On two major occasions in living memory, we thought that a war was winnable and got our butts kicked up between our ears, because we were wrong.

Professional military officers are at least slightly better at making that call, but they don't get to make it in the US. So they tend to demand as much firepower as they can get for fear of being sent into a war they can't win and then getting blamed for not winning it. Moreover, the resulting system promotes officers who are gung-ho about the idea of being thrown into whatever random war American politics generates next, and who will not resign in protest or anything when that war arises. Such officers don't even think in terms of "damn, we need blah blah blahto make sure we can deliver what the politicians are asking for." They think "we need blah blah blah to Defend Freedom and Secure America's Interests."

It's gotten badly out of hand, and I'm not denying it. I'm just trying to explain it.

[D.Turtle]

US military spending in 2008 was 4.6% of the GDP. That doesn't count supplementary funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, which takes it up to 6%ish. Defense spending peaked at 6.2% of GDP under the Regan build-up, 9.4% in the Vietnam War, 14.2% in the Korean War and 38.7% in WWII. For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall. The UK currently spends 2.5% of GDP, France spends 2.6% and Germany spends just 1.1%.

From this precedent it seems highly unlikely that the current level of US military spending will 'bankrupt the country' - although it could be an exacerbating factor to another, primary cause, such as mass dumping of the dollar as a reserve currency. Furthermore arguments that 'the US should spend less on defense' are of little value without specifying how the US should change its foreign policy goals; the current US military is actually fairly well matched to the notional goals that politicians have set for it.

But that is my point: The US is incapable of taking an honest look at their military and asking if all that money it is spending is money well spent. The US is incapable of taking an honest look at its approach to foreign policy and asking if it is helping them. During the Cold War a large military was needed as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. What is the large military needed for now? In case Demons from another dimension invade?

As for Germany, 1.1% is already too low, if one expects the country to make a fair contribution to the defence of Europe and the pursuit of the EU's overseas interests. I used to give Germany a pass on that because it overcontributed to the EU's general budget, but per capita it's nearly on a par with the UK and France now (Scandinavia is still getting screwed), so that excuse no longer flies.

Defend Europe against whom?

Large threats do not suddenly emerge out of nowhere - they require time to become threats. Time during which you can react.

How is creating an army designed for occupying nations rather than defeating their field armies a sign of peaceful, nonimperial intentions? Empires need occupying armies just as much as they need conquering armies, if not more.

Besides which, what happens if everyone retrains their armies for light infantry counterinsurgency work, and then runs into some obnoxious minor power that bought up all the heavy weapons it could find to make itself good at conventional war? Like it or not, someone has to train their forces to blow up tanks and shoot down planes. Otherwise, the world will see a crisis and send in its counterinsurgency forces... only to have them get pounded flat by an army that retained all those tanks and planes and artillery that the West decided to call "obsolete."

PEACEKEEPING! Not fucking occupying you idiot. You know, peacekeeping is where you go into a country with some fucking LEGITIMACY. Peacekeeping is where you go into lawless areas and provide security so nation-building can be done. Such areas do not BY FUCKING DEFINITION have large conventional forces.

And Germany is counting on the US to do that for them. If both Germany and the US agree that we need to put peacekeepers in country X, and the conventional military of country X decides to fight back, guess who gets to take down the Xlander army and air force? It's not going to be the Bundeswehr, let me tell you that.

Why don't you tell me where this country is that needs thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft and several carrier groups etc to pacify?

So... we shouldn't build advanced new weapons like the F-22 until some new enemy shows up, at which point we would be able to churn out hundreds of them in a few years?

No, you build advanced new weapons like the F-22, except in fucking smaller numbers.

That doesn't strike me as a good plan. Wouldn't it be better to build the advanced weapons now and hold them in reserve for later? What happens if there's an unexpected flaw in our design? Under your plan, we'd have to work out the bugs while a new powerful enemy was going on the rampage, because we wouldn't have the weapons to test until the moment when we needed to use them.

Except it costs a lot more to keep a large force up to date that it costs to keep a smaller force up to date. In case you haven't noticed, the US is currently running a small deficit.

Moreover, that relies on the US reacting to the threat in real time, rather than realizing it's going to need to fight a war about six to twelve months before the war actually starts. Democracies do not have a good track record of realizing they're going to need to fight a war far in advance, as I'm sure you're aware.

Wrong, this requires the US reacting to the threat within a time frame of decades. A conventional threat to the US does not appear out of nowhere.

Hell the only ones capable of doing so within a few decades are the EU and maybe China. I think you'll notice when that happens.

The strategy you propose reminds me of Britain's "ten year rule," and that did not go well. It's all very well to say "we don't expect to fight a major war in the next ten years, so we don't need to spend much on weapons." But how do you know when you're going to need to fight a major war in ten years? How do you make sure you don't get overconfident and keep your ten year rule in place until five years before the war breaks out?

Why don't you tell me who is capable of becoming a threat to the US within the next few decades. Hell, even the Soviet Union was only a threat to the US because of their nukes. There hasn't been a country able to threaten the continental US in more than a century.

In which case said military is likely to be incapable of doing its job, because it won't be a "military" at all. It will be a gendarmerie, and like a gendarmerie it will be in deep trouble when people make a serious decision to shoot back. Not if, when. That's the problem with sending your military into tiny local conflicts far away. Even if one side invited you in, the other was already willing to fight and die to win the conflict. Why would that change now that an international gendarmerie has showed up?

For a gendarmerie to work, the gendarmes have to have a real military that they can call for support if someone with serious weapons or organization starts trying to fight them. Who is expected to supply this military? And if such a military is not available, how do you stop your gendarmes from winding up like the Dutch peacekeepers at Srebenica?

Except that Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all showed that a conventional military is extremely ineffective at dealing with a peace-keeping situation. Actually, they aren't just ineffective, they are counterproductive. They cause the locals to turn against you because they inevitably cause some "collateral damage." The soldiers I know who were in Afghanistan fucking hated the Americans going in with their useless heavy-handedness destroying months and years of trust-building and the like.

The peacekeepers at Srebenica were capable militarily of stopping what was happening. What was missing was the political will to do so.

The Western democracies tried that, once. Germany made us regret it. Which makes this whole discussion seem a bit ironic to me...

Funny thing is, Germany had to rearm pretty much from scrap. A rearming that did not happen in secret. A rearming to which people reacted. There was enough of a military to stop Germany. What was missing was the political will to do so.

The problem here is that it's been decades since anyone in the US government actually sat down and came up with an overall geopolitical strategy for the nation that the government would stick to. And that was Cold War containment, which is now completely dead.

So we do not have a plan. Hopefully, the Obama administration will finally get around to creating a post-Cold War strategy for the US, twenty years after the fact, but for the time being we don't have one. Therefore, American foreign policy is decided by a combination of inertia, political expediency, jingoism, and short-term objectives. This has put us in a very awkward policy position.

Thats the fucking point we've been making! That the US has to take a look at its foreign policy and military policy and ask if it is effective. However, it is pretty clear that it is incapable of doing so. Which means the status quo will be kept. And it will be kept for so long until it is incapable of meeting the status quo. So instead of changing its strategy, it will keep on going until it crashes and burns. And then who knows what will happen.

And saying that about the lone hyper/superpower in the world is scary.

[Simon_Jester]

PEACEKEEPING! Not fucking occupying you idiot. You know, peacekeeping is where you go into a country with some fucking LEGITIMACY. Peacekeeping is where you go into lawless areas and provide security so nation-building can be done. Such areas do not BY FUCKING DEFINITION have large conventional forces.

So... who decides whether the troops you sent in to "restore order" are occupiers or peacekeepers? What happens if another faction in the same country disagrees with them? After all, the situation wouldn't be ugly enough to require peacekeepers if there weren't serious violent disagreements already happening on the ground. And what happens if a third party jumps in because it wants to decide what kind of nation gets built in the lawless area in question, not you?

Competent occupation troops and competent peacekeeping troops will have a lot in common; the difference is mostly a matter of whether 80% of the population wants them to go home or 50% wants them to go home. Either way, they're still likely to get shot at if they cross the interests of anyone significant. Or have to stand aside for fear of getting shot at, as did the Dutch at Srebenica.
_______

No, you build advanced new weapons like the F-22, except in fucking smaller numbers.

Ah, so... like the B-2, then? We have maybe one squadron of them based in Missouri, and they cost a ludicrous amount per plane because there's no standardization because we only built twenty of them, and because the R&D costs were spread out over only those twenty airframes.

Is that the correct model for advanced weapons? Or have I missed your plan again?
_______

Wrong, this requires the US reacting to the threat within a time frame of decades. A conventional threat to the US does not appear out of nowhere.

Hell the only ones capable of doing so within a few decades are the EU and maybe China. I think you'll notice when that happens.

You overestimate our perceptiveness. Again, the track record of nations having a clear idea of who will and will not be able to defeat their military in five or ten years' time is not good in the modern era.
______

Why don't you tell me who is capable of becoming a threat to the US within the next few decades. Hell, even the Soviet Union was only a threat to the US because of their nukes. There hasn't been a country able to threaten the continental US in more than a century.

Oh, I'm quite sure we could defend our coastlines on a much lower budget. I thought you wanted us to stay involved in peacekeeping operations. I misunderstood.
______

Except that Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all showed that a conventional military is extremely ineffective at dealing with a peace-keeping situation. Actually, they aren't just ineffective, they are counterproductive. They cause the locals to turn against you because they inevitably cause some "collateral damage." The soldiers I know who were in Afghanistan fucking hated the Americans going in with their useless heavy-handedness destroying months and years of trust-building and the like.

The peacekeepers at Srebenica were capable militarily of stopping what was happening. What was missing was the political will to do so.

Political will is related to military mindset. If your military thinks of itself as a "purely peacekeeping force," you'll find its political will to be lacking. Generals will insist that their troops aren't trained or equipped to deal with serious opposition on the ground, and they will be right.

For another example of this, look at what happened when the Israelis invaded Lebanon back in 2006. I'm not saying the Israelis were competent peacekeepers; they aren't. But they spent decades training their troops to occupy Palestine, bust down doors and arrest people, that sort of thing. Then they tried to invade and occupy a region occupied by a coherent force of light infantry- not even very well trained light infantry- and took serious casualties because they didn't have the right kind of training for assaulting defended positions.

Years of occupation (or peacekeeping) duty are not enough to keep an army competent for the day that it does have to fight another army. And sooner or later, it will, because it's impossible to keep the peace without ticking off a warlord once in a while.
_______

Funny thing is, Germany had to rearm pretty much from scrap. A rearming that did not happen in secret. A rearming to which people reacted. There was enough of a military to stop Germany. What was missing was the political will to do so.

The weakness of political will in the West had a lot to do with the perception that the means to fight a war were lacking, and that the possibility of fighting such a war was unacceptable. Remove the means to fight, and people are far less likely to have the will. Instead, they fool around trying to avoid being "provocative" before mobilizing to fight again.

Which is why this has happened before- even when you know a potential enemy is rearming towards your level, if you've adopted a disarmament mindset there's going to be a significant delay before the public changes gears and realizes there's actually a threat out there somewhere.
________

Thats the fucking point we've been making! That the US has to take a look at its foreign policy and military policy and ask if it is effective. However, it is pretty clear that it is incapable of doing so. Which means the status quo will be kept. And it will be kept for so long until it is incapable of meeting the status quo. So instead of changing its strategy, it will keep on going until it crashes and burns. And then who knows what will happen.

And saying that about the lone hyper/superpower in the world is scary.

I think we're in the process of reworking the policy, but you're right that the process is deeply screwed up. I agree with you about that. I don't like the current status quo; we're overextended and I know it. But that doesn't mean I think that the smart alternative is for the US to microminiaturize its modern weapons programs and convert everything into light infantry who specialize in garrison and occupation duty.

[Guardsman Bass]

A bloodied nose can greatly reduce their aggressiveness.

It didn't after Korea, which was a war that we ultimately stalemated in (after having our nose bloodied in the counter-offensive after the idiot McArthur took the war to the Yalu River).

After Vietnam, they were much more cautious. Most of their foreign interventions were very small.

That was largely because the war had greatly damaged US troop capabilities and exposed the flaws in the US's conscription system.

Moreover, I would question whether it ties into the greater point you are making - that a strong sense of technological superiority in combat leads the US to expend itself in negative and pointless conflicts. Vietnam was a war fought with a recently expanded, not particularly tested army that had been gutted 15 years before in the Eisenhower Presidency, and they weren't packing any massive new technological innovations or reasons to be confident in their capabilities (Stuart referred to it as an "army of conscripts led by anti-aircraft gunners" at one point). It certainly wasn't a case of the US flaunting its amazing new military capabilities.

[Guardsman Bass]

US military spending in 2008 was 4.6% of the GDP. That doesn't count supplementary funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, which takes it up to 6%ish. Defense spending peaked at 6.2% of GDP under the Regan build-up, 9.4% in the Vietnam War, 14.2% in the Korean War and 38.7% in WWII. For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall. The UK currently spends 2.5% of GDP, France spends 2.6% and Germany spends just 1.1%.

From this precedent it seems highly unlikely that the current level of US military spending will 'bankrupt the country' - although it could be an exacerbating factor to another, primary cause, such as mass dumping of the dollar as a reserve currency. Furthermore arguments that 'the US should spend less on defense' are of little value without specifying how the US should change its foreign policy goals; the current US military is actually fairly well matched to the notional goals that politicians have set for it.

But that is my point: The US is incapable of taking an honest look at their military and asking if all that money it is spending is money well spent. The US is incapable of taking an honest look at its approach to foreign policy and asking if it is helping them. During the Cold War a large military was needed as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. What is the large military needed for now? In case Demons from another dimension invade?

There's those pesky treaty obligations. I'm in favor re-negotiating some of them, but as long as we have them, it helps to actually be able to fulfill them if necessary.

As for Germany, 1.1% is already too low, if one expects the country to make a fair contribution to the defence of Europe and the pursuit of the EU's overseas interests. I used to give Germany a pass on that because it overcontributed to the EU's general budget, but per capita it's nearly on a par with the UK and France now (Scandinavia is still getting screwed), so that excuse no longer flies.

Defend Europe against whom?

Large threats do not suddenly emerge out of nowhere - they require time to become threats. Time during which you can react.

But how long? As others have pointed out, it's not like we can pull a fully capable military out of our ass like in World War 2 - it takes a long time to build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them.

How is creating an army designed for occupying nations rather than defeating their field armies a sign of peaceful, nonimperial intentions? Empires need occupying armies just as much as they need conquering armies, if not more.

Besides which, what happens if everyone retrains their armies for light infantry counterinsurgency work, and then runs into some obnoxious minor power that bought up all the heavy weapons it could find to make itself good at conventional war? Like it or not, someone has to train their forces to blow up tanks and shoot down planes. Otherwise, the world will see a crisis and send in its counterinsurgency forces... only to have them get pounded flat by an army that retained all those tanks and planes and artillery that the West decided to call "obsolete."

PEACEKEEPING! Not fucking occupying you idiot. You know, peacekeeping is where you go into a country with some fucking LEGITIMACY. Peacekeeping is where you go into lawless areas and provide security so nation-building can be done. Such areas do not BY FUCKING DEFINITION have large conventional forces.

All in the eye of the beholder. Many of the Somalis in 1993 didn't think the US and UN presence there was "legitimate".

And Germany is counting on the US to do that for them. If both Germany and the US agree that we need to put peacekeepers in country X, and the conventional military of country X decides to fight back, guess who gets to take down the Xlander army and air force? It's not going to be the Bundeswehr, let me tell you that.

Why don't you tell me where this country is that needs thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft and several carrier groups etc to pacify?

It needs the potential ability to overwhelm any threat that might arise in that area, or the peacekeeping force is just a fucking joke. Look at the Congo "peacekeeping" effort if you want to see what that's like.

Moreover, that relies on the US reacting to the threat in real time, rather than realizing it's going to need to fight a war about six to twelve months before the war actually starts. Democracies do not have a good track record of realizing they're going to need to fight a war far in advance, as I'm sure you're aware.

Wrong, this requires the US reacting to the threat within a time frame of decades. A conventional threat to the US does not appear out of nowhere.

Gulf War I was not a case of having a time frame of decades to prepare. Had we followed your advice, the US would have been able to do little but sit on our asses and threaten nuclear war while taking years to actually build up to a force worth a damn, all the while with Saddam entrenching himself in Kuwait and making threatening noises to the Saudis next door.

The strategy you propose reminds me of Britain's "ten year rule," and that did not go well. It's all very well to say "we don't expect to fight a major war in the next ten years, so we don't need to spend much on weapons." But how do you know when you're going to need to fight a major war in ten years? How do you make sure you don't get overconfident and keep your ten year rule in place until five years before the war breaks out?

Why don't you tell me who is capable of becoming a threat to the US within the next few decades. Hell, even the Soviet Union was only a threat to the US because of their nukes. There hasn't been a country able to threaten the continental US in more than a century.

It's not like countries are a bunch of autarkical states - you can royally fuck up a country without ever touching its territory.

Hell, by your logic, the US should have done nothing after World War until the 1960s (when the Soviets finally started bring on-line a large enough number of weapons to threaten CONUS) to secure Western Europe against Soviet subversion - it didn't threaten the continental US directly, which meant it wasn't a real threat or risk to the US right?

[Simon_Jester]

But how long? As others have pointed out, it's not like we can pull a fully capable military out of our ass like in World War 2 - it takes a long time to build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them.

To make matters worse, we didn't pull a fully capable military out of our ass in World War II. The Navy was functional, but the Navy was the one arm of the US military that maintained a high peacetime strength and got plenty of funding for weapons development. The air force was more or less OK, with some bugs in the doctrine- again, because of peacetime R&D expenditures and (as you say) because it was a lot easier to build worthwhile planes in a hurry.

But the US Army had some very serious weaknesses; we mostly made up for it by using overwhelming amounts of manpower and materiel to swamp the Germans. Our tank development was 18 to 24 months behind Germany or Russia's going into the war, and we never caught up; neither did the British.
_______

[the difference between peacekeeping and occupation is] All in the eye of the beholder. Many of the Somalis in 1993 didn't think the US and UN presence there was "legitimate".

Yeah. This is what I'm getting at. The fact that you need armed foreigners to come in and "keep the peace" should be a sign that there are armed locals willing to fight and die to change things in the country, or to keep things the way they are. Whichever side the peacekeepers intervene on, you can bet the other side won't stop shooting just because a few regiments of guys in blue helmets are there now.

Moreover, like it or not the peacekeepers are armed foreigners, and armed foreigners are always good at convincing locals to shoot at them.
______

Gulf War I was not a case of having a time frame of decades to prepare. Had we followed your advice, the US would have been able to do little but sit on our asses and threaten nuclear war while taking years to actually build up to a force worth a damn, all the while with Saddam entrenching himself in Kuwait and making threatening noises to the Saudis next door.

Strictly speaking, no, because at that time, the US (and Germany) had a powerful enemy they might need to fight a ground war with. Like the Bundeswehr, the US Army would have maintained a lot of heavy firepower, and still had it for the first Gulf War.

Then, like the Bundeswehr, we'd have scrapped a lot of it in the 1990s.

[D.Turtle]

So... who decides whether the troops you sent in to "restore order" are occupiers or peacekeepers? What happens if another faction in the same country disagrees with them? After all, the situation wouldn't be ugly enough to require peacekeepers if there weren't serious violent disagreements already happening on the ground. And what happens if a third party jumps in because it wants to decide what kind of nation gets built in the lawless area in question, not you?

Competent occupation troops and competent peacekeeping troops will have a lot in common; the difference is mostly a matter of whether 80% of the population wants them to go home or 50% wants them to go home. Either way, they're still likely to get shot at if they cross the interests of anyone significant. Or have to stand aside for fear of getting shot at, as did the Dutch at Srebenica.

An occupying force infers that there first was a hostile invasion. A peacekeeping force goes into a lawless area to enforce the peace. Such a lawless area will by definition not have highly trained armored forces. A peacekeeping force does not go in unarmed. They go in lightly armed. A first world lightly armed military force is quite heavily armed in comparison to any third world force remaining in such a lawless area.

Ah, so... like the B-2, then? We have maybe one squadron of them based in Missouri, and they cost a ludicrous amount per plane because there's no standardization because we only built twenty of them, and because the R&D costs were spread out over only those twenty airframes.

Is that the correct model for advanced weapons? Or have I missed your plan again?

Is it my problem that the US is sucking so much defense industry cock that they are incapable of telling them to shape up? Other countries with much smaller military budgets somehow manage to equip their forces.

Oh, I'm quite sure we could defend our coastlines on a much lower budget. I thought you wanted us to stay involved in peacekeeping operations. I misunderstood.

Peacekeeping operations do not require hundreds (thousands?) of fighters, thousands of tanks, several carrier groups, etc.

Political will is related to military mindset. If your military thinks of itself as a "purely peacekeeping force," you'll find its political will to be lacking. Generals will insist that their troops aren't trained or equipped to deal with serious opposition on the ground, and they will be right.

For another example of this, look at what happened when the Israelis invaded Lebanon back in 2006. I'm not saying the Israelis were competent peacekeepers; they aren't. But they spent decades training their troops to occupy Palestine, bust down doors and arrest people, that sort of thing. Then they tried to invade and occupy a region occupied by a coherent force of light infantry- not even very well trained light infantry- and took serious casualties because they didn't have the right kind of training for assaulting defended positions.

Years of occupation (or peacekeeping) duty are not enough to keep an army competent for the day that it does have to fight another army. And sooner or later, it will, because it's impossible to keep the peace without ticking off a warlord once in a while.

Somehow Germany managed to retain their competence and even expand on it after the first world war, when they were limited to a 100.000 man strong army. This small army was used to develop doctrines etc that enabled it to be rapidly built up and become one of the strongest militaries in the world within a short time span (6 years or so). I have repeatedly advocated keeping a small conventional force that is aimed at retaining that capability and being able to rapidly upsize that conventional force if it ever becomes more likely to be needed. Such a small conventional force would be more than enough to take on any second-rate warlord or third world country.

I think we're in the process of reworking the policy, but you're right that the process is deeply screwed up. I agree with you about that. I don't like the current status quo; we're overextended and I know it. But that doesn't mean I think that the smart alternative is for the US to microminiaturize its modern weapons programs and convert everything into light infantry who specialize in garrison and occupation duty.

Then what do you propose to do?

There's those pesky treaty obligations. I'm in favor re-negotiating some of them, but as long as we have them, it helps to actually be able to fulfill them if necessary.

Well, the only are where a large hostile force exists is in North Korea. And even there the South Korean public wants you out of there. Besides that, what huge treaty obligations exist that require you to spend more than the rest of the world combined on your military?

But how long? As others have pointed out, it's not like we can pull a fully capable military out of our ass like in World War 2 - it takes a long time to build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them.

Exactly, it takes a long time build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them - which means the warning time is even larger as any potential enemy first has to emerge and then build up. There currently is no enemy that requires the massive military the US has.

All in the eye of the beholder. Many of the Somalis in 1993 didn't think the US and UN presence there was "legitimate".

And pacifying Somalia would need thousands of planes, thousands of tanks, several carrier groups, etc.?

The only reason to have such a military is to be able to invade or destroy first and second world countries.

It needs the potential ability to overwhelm any threat that might arise in that area, or the peacekeeping force is just a fucking joke. Look at the Congo "peacekeeping" effort if you want to see what that's like.

And a western peacekeeping force with light armored vehicles would be more than enough to destroy any and all forces in a third world shithole.

Gulf War I was not a case of having a time frame of decades to prepare. Had we followed your advice, the US would have been able to do little but sit on our asses and threaten nuclear war while taking years to actually build up to a force worth a damn, all the while with Saddam entrenching himself in Kuwait and making threatening noises to the Saudis next door.

At that time a credible threat still existed. Where is that threat today? The closest might be Iran, and you are at fault for that since you removed their main rival. And the only reason you even care about that region is that you are incapable of doing something about your dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And even then you could also instead provide military aid to aligned countries and make them able to defend themselves.

It's not like countries are a bunch of autarkical states - you can royally fuck up a country without ever touching its territory.

Hell, by your logic, the US should have done nothing after World War until the 1960s (when the Soviets finally started bring on-line a large enough number of weapons to threaten CONUS) to secure Western Europe against Soviet subversion - it didn't threaten the continental US directly, which meant it wasn't a real threat or risk to the US right?

The Soviet Union was a direct threat to western Europe right from the end of World War 2. The US decided at that time that protecting western Europe was part of its strategic goal of containing the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union, that goal was met and with it the need to protect western Europe against them. Who do the US have to protect today? Where is this massive threat requiring the massive conventional forces the US has?

Yeah. This is what I'm getting at. The fact that you need armed foreigners to come in and "keep the peace" should be a sign that there are armed locals willing to fight and die to change things in the country, or to keep things the way they are. Whichever side the peacekeepers intervene on, you can bet the other side won't stop shooting just because a few regiments of guys in blue helmets are there now.

Moreover, like it or not the peacekeepers are armed foreigners, and armed foreigners are always good at convincing locals to shoot at them.

But you do not need thousand of tanks, airplanes etc to fight such an enemy. In fact fighting them with the same is counterproductive.

[Guardsman Bass]

There's those pesky treaty obligations. I'm in favor re-negotiating some of them, but as long as we have them, it helps to actually be able to fulfill them if necessary.

Well, the only are where a large hostile force exists is in North Korea. And even there the South Korean public wants you out of there.

They vaccillate a lot on that (the public, that is - the latest guy is favorable to stronger US ties, while the guy before him came around), but their government has never seriously sought to completely kick out the US (much less end the treaty affiliation).

Besides that, what huge treaty obligations exist that require you to spend more than the rest of the world combined on your military?

Well, there's NATO - and that's not just against extra-Europe threats (one of the justifications of NATO is that it helps keep the Europeans from heavily re-arming on a state-by-state basis and then potentially fracturing again - make of that as you will). There's Taiwan, so you need the ability to keep the Chinese out. Korea, of course. Japan too, although that's mainly a naval requirement.

All of these require a US capability to project highly effective force in multiple arenas, which drives costs way up (Operations and Personnel are, if I recall correctly, the most expensive costs in the military).

But how long? As others have pointed out, it's not like we can pull a fully capable military out of our ass like in World War 2 - it takes a long time to build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them.

Exactly, it takes a long time build worthwhile weapons these days, and even longer to develop them - which means the warning time is even larger as any potential enemy first has to emerge and then build up. There currently is no enemy that requires the massive military the US has.

Not on a global level, no. But there are regional actors that are well-armed, and arming right now, where having state-of-the-art hardware and the best military to use it is a major advantage. Unfortunately, they're not particularly close to home or in the same area.

All in the eye of the beholder. Many of the Somalis in 1993 didn't think the US and UN presence there was "legitimate".

And pacifying Somalia would need thousands of planes, thousands of tanks, several carrier groups, etc.?

You need the ability to overwhelm anything any particular faction could throw at you.

The only reason to have such a military is to be able to invade or destroy first and second world countries.

And North Korea.

It needs the potential ability to overwhelm any threat that might arise in that area, or the peacekeeping force is just a fucking joke. Look at the Congo "peacekeeping" effort if you want to see what that's like.

And a western peacekeeping force with light armored vehicles would be more than enough to destroy any and all forces in a third world shithole.

The force already there is lightly armed and armored, and is nothing resembling effective.

Gulf War I was not a case of having a time frame of decades to prepare. Had we followed your advice, the US would have been able to do little but sit on our asses and threaten nuclear war while taking years to actually build up to a force worth a damn, all the while with Saddam entrenching himself in Kuwait and making threatening noises to the Saudis next door.

At that time a credible threat still existed. Where is that threat today? The closest might be Iran, and you are at fault for that since you removed their main rival. And the only reason you even care about that region is that you are incapable of doing something about your dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And even then you could also instead provide military aid to aligned countries and make them able to defend themselves.

We already do that latter (witness aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt).

As for the "credible threat" part, part of the reason why Gulf War I was a surprise was because they didn't see them as a credible threat until it was too late.

It's not like countries are a bunch of autarkical states - you can royally fuck up a country without ever touching its territory.

Hell, by your logic, the US should have done nothing after World War until the 1960s (when the Soviets finally started bring on-line a large enough number of weapons to threaten CONUS) to secure Western Europe against Soviet subversion - it didn't threaten the continental US directly, which meant it wasn't a real threat or risk to the US right?

The Soviet Union was a direct threat to western Europe right from the end of World War 2. The US decided at that time that protecting western Europe was part of its strategic goal of containing the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union, that goal was met and with it the need to protect western Europe against them. Who do the US have to protect today? Where is this massive threat requiring the massive conventional forces the US has?

Are you conceding my point, then, that security isn't simply a matter of protecting the territory?

[D.Turtle]

And pacifying Somalia would need thousands of planes, thousands of tanks, several carrier groups, etc.?

You need the ability to overwhelm anything any particular faction could throw at you.

No faction in Somalia or anywhere in Africa (except maybe South Africa) is capable of defeating even a lightly armored western military.

The force already there is lightly armed and armored, and is nothing resembling effective.

The force there is a laughable force of other African militaries that can barely afford to arm them with small arms not to mention equip them with any armored vehicles.

Are you conceding my point, then, that security isn't simply a matter of protecting the territory?

You need enough of a military to defend your country from a conventional attack. Apart from that a military focused on peacekeeping/enforcing would be a lot more useful - as that is what most of the US military is preoccupied with anyway.

So yes, security is more than just defending your territory. The question is, do you need the a military aimed being able to invade any other country Earth? Or would a smaller force be enough - or even better?

Most of the enemies the US has in the world today are enemies that the US created through their heavy-handedness. Like I said, you are so scared of losing your superpower status that you are on a direct path to doing so.

[K. A. Pital]

As it happens Gates believes that future US Presidents will mostly want to invade and occupy third-world countries and is trying to support that, which is not dereliction of duty, it's just shortsighted.

Actually, what did the US do other than occupy, invade, or stage coups in Third World nations for the last 50 years or so? When had it ever fought a foe technically and logistically equal to itself? The answer would probably be never.

[Darth Wong]

Moreover, I would question whether it ties into the greater point you are making - that a strong sense of technological superiority in combat leads the US to expend itself in negative and pointless conflicts. Vietnam was a war fought with a recently expanded, not particularly tested army that had been gutted 15 years before in the Eisenhower Presidency, and they weren't packing any massive new technological innovations or reasons to be confident in their capabilities (Stuart referred to it as an "army of conscripts led by anti-aircraft gunners" at one point). It certainly wasn't a case of the US flaunting its amazing new military capabilities.

Yes, it's easy to point out now that the US was not very well-equipped to fight that war. However, the point is that at the time, they thought it would be easy. False confidence is a buoy which floats bad ideas about war. Similarly, the high-tech superiority of American armed forces in 2003 led Rumsfeld to boldly predict that the entire operation would take only a few weeks, or at most, a few months.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, so... like the B-2, then? We have maybe one squadron of them based in Missouri, and they cost a ludicrous amount per plane because there's no standardization because we only built twenty of them, and because the R&D costs were spread out over only those twenty airframes.
Is that the correct model for advanced weapons? Or have I missed your plan again?

Is it my problem that the US is sucking so much defense industry cock that they are incapable of telling them to shape up? Other countries with much smaller military budgets somehow manage to equip their forces.

Well, since you're telling the US military what to do, with little thought that a strategy that works beautifully in Germany might not be so great for us, it arguably becomes your problem...

But more seriously, many of those other countries equip their forces by buying someone else's weapons. Since the US is already supplying a large chunk of the world with weapons, it might be a little difficult for us to go shopping for someone else to design our aircraft for us.

Of the countries that do design and build their own weapons, you see a lot of them putting together substantial production runs (see the Gripen or Typhoon fighters for examples). It isn't worth it to research how to build a new jet or tank if you're only going to build twenty of them, even if you plan to build hundreds in the event that you realize you'll need them to fight a war.

If you insist on production runs of twenty, the weapons never get built... which means that they're not just not available in quantity until you mobilize, they're not there. They do not exist for you to arm yourself with. Which undermines your ability to react to a crisis by expanding your military, because you need five or ten years of lead time just to design the weapons you'll need to fight with.
_______

Peacekeeping operations do not require hundreds (thousands?) of fighters, thousands of tanks, several carrier groups, etc.

Yes. A force of gendarmes large enough to sit on one country going through a low-grade civil war is quite small, all things considered.

Interesting times if there are two countries going through a low-grade civil war. And if you worry about that possibility and start building up multiple armies to cover different parts of the world, your costs start going up until you're in the same general range as the US was before.
_______

Somehow Germany managed to retain their competence and even expand on it after the first world war, when they were limited to a 100.000 man strong army. This small army was used to develop doctrines etc that enabled it to be rapidly built up and become one of the strongest militaries in the world within a short time span (6 years or so). I have repeatedly advocated keeping a small conventional force that is aimed at retaining that capability and being able to rapidly upsize that conventional force if it ever becomes more likely to be needed. Such a small conventional force would be more than enough to take on any second-rate warlord or third world country.

For Germany, that is enough. These days, nobody's going to blame Germany for doing nothing when they've run out of manpower to do it with. People do blame America for doing nothing, with reason. Why don't we do something about Darfur? Because we don't have enough troops. Cutting the size of our conventional forces down to a few divisions isn't going to make us more likely to succeed at tasks like that. And it's very likely to force us to leave specific allies uncovered (South Korea comes to mind).

And yes, I'm sure that's quite acceptable to you; you might very well consider this a superior outcome. But it shouldn't be hard to understand why we don't feel the same way as a nation. Remember that that hundred thousand man army had to be imposed on Germany by a humiliating treaty; they did not decide to do it of their own free will. Nor did they have any credible plan in place for what to do if a serious conventional threat arose faster than they could rearm (say, the Soviet Union).

Today, Germany is surrounded by friends to the point where it has little need of a local army, and armies to fight distant foreign wars are always optional. Unless the US decides to turn turtle and defend only its borders, which would be a very serious policy change, the US can't disarm to those levels and still do the things that it's specifically made commitments to do.

Again, if you don't give a damn whether those things happen or not, this will not be a compelling argument to you. Not a big surprise; your country isn't the one that agreed to do it in the first place. But I hope you can understand why other sane people would be compelled by it.
_______

Then what do you propose to do?

Scale back construction of some of the most advanced weapons, keeping enough to make it at least vaguely worthwhile to build them in the first place- the size of the Raptor fleet is about right at this point, I think. Scrap construction of some advanced weapons programs that are still on the drawing board and which have doubtful utility, at least for now. Do shift some of that funding to the kind of "light infantry occupation" roles you're talking about.

Do not make major cuts in the size of the US Army. Probably cut the air force somewhat as older airframes are decommissioned; air assets are more redeployable than surface weapons anyway. Reduce our foreign troop commitments as fast as possible with national honor so that we can rethink our tactics and deployments- which also saves money, because keeping soldiers in Iraq is quite a bit more expensive than keeping them in North Carolina.

Off the top of my head, I do not know how much money this would save- but since the US military budget isn't actually a crushing percentage of our GDP, I don't think the need for military savings is as urgent for the US as you do. What the US really needs to do is admit to itself that it needs a tax rate commensurate with its planned spending levels. Which means either scrapping some of the entitlement programs (along with about 1/4 to 1/3 of the military budget) and keeping taxes as they are, or raising taxes.

[Darth Wong]

People do blame America for doing nothing, with reason.

Yeah. That reason is the fact that America has a larger military budget than the rest of the world combined. You're going around in circles, justifying the massive military budget by appealing to political factors which themselves are a function of the massive military budget.

[Coyote]

But that is my point: The US is incapable of taking an honest look at their military and asking if all that money it is spending is money well spent. The US is incapable of taking an honest look at its approach to foreign policy and asking if it is helping them...

The American people ask the leaders in Congress and the Senate to look into the wasteful spending on unneeded weapons. Unfortunately, those very guardians are the ones getting assloads of money from the military-industrial complex to buy the stuff, and even if the military doesn't ask for it, need it, or even want it, it gets shoved down their throats. The politicans who are supposed to be the watch dogs over all this can then go home to their voters and say "I created an assload of jobs for y'all! Vote for me again!"

If any of the voters back home say "yeah, he created jobs... but to do so it required massive defecit spending on a nationwide scale. Is that really so good?" The politician can then point to that critic and say "He wants to close down the factory I filled with jobs! He hates America! He hates his fellow citizens! He's a socialist! He probably makes Jesus cry!" and the mob of retards runs that person out.

Thus we end up in the cycle we're in. To blame it on just "jingoism" is overly simplistic. The real problem is, you're arguing against big corporations who can fill the pockets of our supposed guardians of the budget. What can you do in return? Vote, but for who? The other guy that is getting his pockets filled by a different megacorporation?

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. That reason is the fact that America has a larger military budget than the rest of the world combined. You're going around in circles, justifying the massive military budget by appealing to political factors which themselves are a function of the massive military budget.

That is exactly right. The US has trapped itself in a circular situation: by building up a massive military (which it originally did for fairly logical reasons), we found ourselves with options for using that military and took them, which got us committed to situations that required us to maintain the military.

At this point, the only way for the US to back out of the trap is to say (to summarize):
"Goodbye South Korea; Europe, go pay for your own damn military; the Middle East can fuck itself over without our help for all we care; we are leaving."

Then we could pull back effectively all the troops, vastly scale down our military, save a few percent of GDP a year, make a good sized dent in the overall national deficit... and pray that the ensuing shitstorm doesn't spray us too badly. We could do it. Measured in dollars and troop movements, it would work. If real life were a simplified simulation like the Civilization games, it would be crazy for us not to do that.

The problem comes when things get complicated, which they have. Any plausible American government has a lot of domestic political prestige tied up in our foreign troop deployments. We've entrapped ourselves with "interests" overseas that the leaders of a democracy can no longer safely ignore. And we've been in that position long enough to develop an entire mindset based on the idea of being able to do something about any crisis that arises anywhere in the world.

Because of the complications, because of all the pride and jingoism and hope and history* tied up in America's overextended net of foreign deployments and foreign commitments, I'm honestly not sure that pulling everything in would cost us less than keeping it there. I don't like it, but I can't lie to myself and pretend that pulling back would be easy, nor can I pretend that I'm sure it would be wise.

*And yes, because of all the guys in the military-industrial complex bribing our politicos...
________

We're in exactly the same situation that Washington warned us against, with a side order of the situation Eisenhower warned us against. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a place with no obvious way out.

[montypython]

That is exactly right. The US has trapped itself in a circular situation: by building up a massive military (which it originally did for fairly logical reasons), we found ourselves with options for using that military and took them, which got us committed to situations that required us to maintain the military.

At this point, the only way for the US to back out of the trap is to say (to summarize):
"Goodbye South Korea; Europe, go pay for your own damn military; the Middle East can fuck itself over without our help for all we care; we are leaving."

Then we could pull back effectively all the troops, vastly scale down our military, save a few percent of GDP a year, make a good sized dent in the overall national deficit... and pray that the ensuing shitstorm doesn't spray us too badly. We could do it. Measured in dollars and troop movements, it would work. If real life were a simplified simulation like the Civilization games, it would be crazy for us not to do that.

The problem comes when things get complicated, which they have. Any plausible American government has a lot of domestic political prestige tied up in our foreign troop deployments. We've entrapped ourselves with "interests" overseas that the leaders of a democracy can no longer safely ignore. And we've been in that position long enough to develop an entire mindset based on the idea of being able to do something about any crisis that arises anywhere in the world.

Because of the complications, because of all the pride and jingoism and hope and history* tied up in America's overextended net of foreign deployments and foreign commitments, I'm honestly not sure that pulling everything in would cost us less than keeping it there. I don't like it, but I can't lie to myself and pretend that pulling back would be easy, nor can I pretend that I'm sure it would be wise.

*And yes, because of all the guys in the military-industrial complex bribing our politicos...
________

We're in exactly the same situation that Washington warned us against, with a side order of the situation Eisenhower warned us against. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a place with no obvious way out.

The other aspect that gets unmentioned all too often is how the constant increase of military expenditures outpaces civil economic activity, so much so that the continuation of this course would eventually do to the US military what the happened to both the British and the Soviet military. Fixed focus on military expenditures depletes the civil economic resources to sustain it, in the material and political sense, and for why even if a difficult decision for change has to be made about it, better it be done now while it is still a choice, rather than when all options are utterly exhausted.

[Darth Wong]

There's also the opportunity cost. If the same money were spent on other kinds of public infrastructure spending, it might have more of a net positive effect on the civilian economy, and without generating so many long-term entanglements and commitments. The relationship between the military-industrial complex and the civilian government has become a rather abusive one.

[Nephtys]

That is exactly right. The US has trapped itself in a circular situation: by building up a massive military (which it originally did for fairly logical reasons), we found ourselves with options for using that military and took them, which got us committed to situations that required us to maintain the military.

At this point, the only way for the US to back out of the trap is to say (to summarize):
"Goodbye South Korea; Europe, go pay for your own damn military; the Middle East can fuck itself over without our help for all we care; we are leaving."

Then we could pull back effectively all the troops, vastly scale down our military, save a few percent of GDP a year, make a good sized dent in the overall national deficit... and pray that the ensuing shitstorm doesn't spray us too badly. We could do it. Measured in dollars and troop movements, it would work. If real life were a simplified simulation like the Civilization games, it would be crazy for us not to do that.

The problem comes when things get complicated, which they have. Any plausible American government has a lot of domestic political prestige tied up in our foreign troop deployments. We've entrapped ourselves with "interests" overseas that the leaders of a democracy can no longer safely ignore. And we've been in that position long enough to develop an entire mindset based on the idea of being able to do something about any crisis that arises anywhere in the world.

Because of the complications, because of all the pride and jingoism and hope and history* tied up in America's overextended net of foreign deployments and foreign commitments, I'm honestly not sure that pulling everything in would cost us less than keeping it there. I don't like it, but I can't lie to myself and pretend that pulling back would be easy, nor can I pretend that I'm sure it would be wise.

*And yes, because of all the guys in the military-industrial complex bribing our politicos...
________

We're in exactly the same situation that Washington warned us against, with a side order of the situation Eisenhower warned us against. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a place with no obvious way out.

The other aspect that gets unmentioned all too often is how the constant increase of military expenditures outpaces civil economic activity, so much so that the continuation of this course would eventually do to the US military what the happened to both the British and the Soviet military. Fixed focus on military expenditures depletes the civil economic resources to sustain it, in the material and political sense, and for why even if a difficult decision for change has to be made about it, better it be done now while it is still a choice, rather than when all options are utterly exhausted.

What 'increase' in military expenditures are we talking about here? While in the earlier Bush years, the budget went up to 540 Billion, but it's been declining since 2006. And the US military budget was in general decline from 1991-2001.

I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that 'increases' are ruining anything, especially when the budgets are going down. And military expenditures are clearly not exhausting the Government, given that the bailout packages combined are in the multiple trillions.

[Darth Wong]

I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that 'increases' are ruining anything, especially when the budgets are going down. And military expenditures are clearly not exhausting the Government, given that the bailout packages combined are in the multiple trillions.

Have you ever had to budget anything? Saying that something can't be bad for your budget because you have bigger items to pay for is really broken logic. It's a question of needs vs wants. If I have to pay for car repairs, that takes precedence over a new shirt. The new shirt may be much cheaper than the car repairs, but it would still be fiscally irresponsible of me to buy that new shirt, especially when my budget is being strained by the car repairs.

[Simon_Jester]

There's also the opportunity cost. If the same money were spent on other kinds of public infrastructure spending, it might have more of a net positive effect on the civilian economy, and without generating so many long-term entanglements and commitments. The relationship between the military-industrial complex and the civilian government has become a rather abusive one.

This is true.

Of course, given the state of the budget right now, I suspect that mass-scale military budget cuts would just go straight into the national debt, rather than paying for infrastructure.

[Bluewolf]

The problem is, how far could you start cutting the US's military forces before the opposation and the public jump on it and say that the defence of America is being stripped bear? The US puts a lot of faith into its military and has quite a lot of pride for it. Cutting it would make a lot of enemies.

[Batman]

I don't think anybody ever suggested such a cut was actually really POSSIBLE. If anything I think that's considered part of the PROBLEM. The US administration has become so entangled with the MIC for reasons that have nothing to do with actual defense needs, and the US public has become so used to believing that if the US DOESN'T have the biggest baddest newest tools, America is in peril, that such cuts may be nigh impossible to get through. This is about wether or not the US actually NEED this massive better-then-everybody-else-and-then-some military.