Metahive wrote:You think the US plonking military bases around all over the world is there to protect people? No, they are there to project power and protect the US' political and economical interests and that's been a staple of foreign politics since forever...
Has it ever for one moment occurred to you that
despite the obvious fact that the US uses its network of bases and power projection to enforce its own interests, it may also be using them to enforce someone else's interests at the same time?
I mean, I get how you want it to be this simple. But if you're going to reduce a major budget dispute to a one-liner ("DOWNSIZE THE SHIT OUT OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!"), then there's a serious problem with the way you're thinking about the issue.
It's not even that you're
wrong about the idea of downsizing. It's that you're painting this picture of America-as-cartoon-villain, which can be somehow made to just go away and everything automatically gets better by default. That is not an intelligent way to approach this kind of discussion, any more than "HOOAH MURCA ROX!" would be.
I feel also extremely insulted by your insinuation that the reason I want to see the US' military budget cut is because I don't care about "brown people" and am a rabid US hater. Way to try and poison the well.
The reality is that most of the countries in the world that are potentially in real danger from attacking neighbors
do expect the US to help them. You appear to be counseling the US to not provide such assistance. Fair enough- but in that case, are you really surprised when I consider you
indifferent to what happens to those countries? How can you say "A, get rid of the capability to do anything for B in case they're invaded by C," without coming across as indifferent to whether C gets to beat up B or not?
Also, hm. Come to think of it, Metahive, you never answered my question.
Would you mind listing some specific instances of things that need to have the shit downsized out of them?
Your question belies a certain assumption that I don't share, let me therefore ask you a counter question first,
do you believe each and every penny put into the US military is necessary for it to fulfill its purpose? Do you think it's normal for a nation that's under no dire threat from the outside to spend more than half of its budged on the military and actually be responsible for almost half the military spending worldwide?
And now my answer: cut anything that isn't relevant for the US military to fulfill its one and only purpose, to protect the US from outside attacks. Remove bases from the globe where they are not necessary for the US to function unhindered as a nation. Reduce military spending to match that of its two most likely rivals, Russia and China. Give up pie in the sky nonsense like stealth destroyers and the like unless you have reason to believe they will be absolutely vital to defend the US in the nearest future.
Let's see...
"Cut anything that isn't relevant to protect the US from outside attacks."
That is not specific. That is you saying "OK, generals, decide what you don't need to protect the US, then cut spending on it."
"Remove bases from the globe where they are not necessary."
First of all we can argue the definition of 'necessary.' It is perhaps not
necessary to have radar monitoring stations in Canada to watch for ballistic missiles coming over the pole, one might argue that since in the event of a serious ballistic missile attack we're all dead anyway, we might as well not see it coming. Or that a serious ballistic missile attack will 'never' happen and that therefore defense against it is unnecessary. But these are very, very dubious claims in my opinion... and yet for all I know, you would think that such a tracking station is "unnecessary."
Second of all, this is probably one of the
easiest cases where it would hardly have killed you to name some specifics, because there are plenty of such bases out there (though a lot have already been closed down since the Cold War). And yet, you did not.
"Reduce military spending... to match... Russia and China."
Is that a budget target meant to apply
regardless of whether or not we can meet it while only removing the 'unnecessary' things? If we somehow find that it actually does cost more than 275 billion dollars a year to provide national defense for the US, should we still spend less because Russia+China combined don't spend that much?
Does it matter that Chinese military spending is likely to increase due to their growing economy? Should we wait for
later to beggar ourselves trying to match their fully developed economy when it emerges in the mid-21st century, rather than spending proportionately more
now to ensure security later?
Does it matter that if we did find ourselves in conflict with either China or Russia, it would be desirable to take the war to
them rather than fighting it in our living rooms... but that the capability to do this is relatively more expensive and requires the hated foreign base system?
"Give up pie in the sky nonsense like stealth destroyers and the like unless you have reason to believe they will be absolutely vital to defend the US in the nearest future."
OK, that is, to your credit, one
specific thing you think should be dropped: "stealth destroyers." Does that mean you think that all warship designs that are stealthy should be abolished? Or are you referring to a specific ship program that should be cancelled in order to save money? This is a promising line you're going along, but I'm a little vague on the details.
Also, "in the nearest future" sounds like a very bad idea. Modern warships stay in the water for a long time- fifty years is typical. The Air Force is still flying planes from the 1980s, 1970s, and in some cases 1950s.
Designing weapons that are just barely good enough to deal with current threats, because they will be "absolutely vital in the nearest future" is a really stupid plan. Because it means ten or twenty years down the road, a rival will trot out something new, and we'll need an entirely new warship/plane/tank/whatever to have any chance of countering it.
Which means we'd need to do the R&D cost of designing a counterweapon anyway, and have to design and build a whole new class of weapons, to replace old weapons that would otherwise be quite serviceable...
if they'd been designed at the cutting edge of the available technology.
So as a procurement policy, "design weapon systems only to counter what's already on the market and likely to be fired at us within the next six months" or whatever leaves a lot to be desired, because it means that large, expensive weapons programs can be rendered totally obsolete in a matter of a few months by the release of a new technology.
Trying to cram in advanced capability into everything at least means we're likely to avoid having to start all over again because we fell behind the curve. And it's not like we can stop R&D arms races from happening just because
we decide not to play that game.
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But all of this, except for one vague reference to "stealth destroyers" that could just as easily have come out of Civilization IV or a James Bond movie as out of military reality, is
nonspecific.
I mean hell,
I can think of things the US military should, in my opinion, cut spending on. Yes, I really do think that some of the things the US military spends on are wastes of time and money. But I at least know the names of the programs I'm proposing to get rid of, and can at least put out a paragraph or two explaining why they're disposable. Or provide an illustrative example of why a bad spending practice is bad.
You, on the other hand, seem to have decided that there must be hundreds of billions of dollars of fat in the military budget... without being willing to say exactly what.
You remind me of the way the Republicans keep promising huge savings by cutting discretionary spending, without ever being specific because the reality is the spending cuts they want literally are not there, no one is blowing billions on welfare Cadillacs for single mothers.
Which is not to say there are no things the US military should cut, including some stupidly pointless and wasteful things. Because I just said there are such things, in case you weren't reading closely. But it seems... blindly disrespectful to the idea of truth, for lack of a better term... to assert that massive amounts of X must exist and not be able to point to a single example of X.
So I don't think I'm out of line in still asking,
Would you mind listing some specific instances of things that need to have the shit downsized out of them?
Terralthra wrote:I don't want a carrier available in every part of the world at a moment's notice, or at least, I don't want that nearly as much as I want a lot of other things.
Okay. Now, convince the American public of this, and while you're at it convince the various self-identified US allies out there that
they don't need that kind of coverage. Or at least have the courtesy to break the news to them that help is going to be two weeks away instead of three days in case they get in trouble. And that it may not come at all, because of budget cuts.
Guess they'll just have to start paying for some of those carriers themselves. Not our problem.
It's incredibly disingenuous to suggest that amphibious combat ships (e.g. the Wasp-class) can't be considered aircraft carriers because they can't launch the "most modern" aircraft (I presume you mean the F-22). They can launch Harriers just fine, and Harriers have been used successfully in the only theatres the US has been shooting people recently: Iraq and Afghanistan.
No, I do not mean the F-22, because nobody has ever seriously proposed to use that as a carrier aircraft. I did not say "the most modern." I said "
fully effective modern" aircraft. The reason I said that is because the US's carrier air units might some day have to fight someone who actually has working fighter jets and anti-aircraft missiles of their own, which the Taliban and 2003-era Saddam Hussein did not.
Harriers cannot carry many of the modern weapons, cannot make effective use of modern electronics, and cannot fly fast enough or high enough or sneaky enough to avoid enemy air defenses. They work fine as long as the people you're fighting have no weapons designed after 1970 or so, and not many of the
best weapons designed before 1970, either.
They are not "fully effective." They are to real, well-equipped militaries what a schoolyard bully is to a fully trained adult boxer or martial artist: a mismatch so severe that it would be insanity to propose a fight between the two.
By contrast, the modern generation of F-18 (an updated version of a
forty year old design) is a fully effective modern combat aircraft, which can carry most of the weapons the US Air Force now uses, though not all the better weapons currently being designed. It is at least fast and high enough to have a chance of fighting through air defenses, though not sneaky enough to be
safe doing so. It is, at least for now, "fully effective." Check back with me in twenty or thirty years; that may no longer be true then.
The amphibious warfare ships cannot fly the F-18. They COULD fly the F-35B, which is capable enough to be "fully effective," and hopefully will remain so for a long time to come. But the F-35B is a monstrously expensive thing to design in its own right.
If only catapult-assist capable carriers count, then we have 11 (counting the Kitty Hawk), with three more under construction, while the rest of the world, combined, has six. Counting construction underway, we have 14, and the rest of the world climbs all the way to eight.
Kitty Hawk has been decommissioned, is over fifty years old, and is due to be retired very very shortly for very good reasons. It is silly to count
Kitty Hawk as a carrier we will
still have in the future when another carriers specifically intended to replace her is finished.
Also, the US Navy's force levels are set by the missions other people ask it to perform, not by its ability to win a cage match against some other navy or combination of navies.
Unfortunately, being in a position to do something about it when Country B invades Country C on the other side of the world, or when Country D starts sheltering mass murderers who killed your citizens, is an expensive capability... which is precisely why nobody but the US bothers with it.
If you want the US Navy to scale back to "win a cage match, probably" levels, then yes, that's cheaper. Now, convince the American public and the various self-identified US allies that this is a good move.
From what I understand, the same yard is currently building two aircraft carriers simultaneously, so there are at least two dry docks capable of building carriers.
That is not the case. The latest carrier to be built, the
Gerald R. Ford, is structurally finished, and can now float... but is not ready for combat and is therefore not "commissioned." The next one,
John F. Kennedy, is now under construction in the same drydock used to build
Ford. So no, there are not two such drydocks.
Interestingly, the USN recently announced it was looking into slowing down its carrier construction so as to prevent having more than 12 carriers in service at once. So, the current debate is not whether or not we have too many carriers, it's between "do we have exactly enough carriers" and "do we need MORE carriers".
"Do we have exactly enough" won. I support that.
You say we have ten, and we can't really go below that if we want to be able to bomb anyone on the planet, right now. I say maybe bombing anyone on the planet on a moment's notice isn't as important as providing things people need, like power plants that don't worsen global warming, a functional mass transit system that doesn't worsen global warming, an educational system that isn't falling apart at the seams and funded by individual student debt, and more. If you disagree about these priorities, fine; if we disagree about political priorities, clearly we'll disagree about budget allocation as well. But throughout, you've couched all of your arguments in terms of "what Congress wants" and "what the American population wants". What do you want?
What I want is to keep the carrier force, keep a lot of other things in the military, scrap a few specific things (that I know of) and maybe a few things I don't know of.
Then raise the capital gains tax and the top tax brackets so we actually
can pay for things, instead of this idiotic rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul nonsense. Because I don't think realistic military budget cuts will free up enough money to help, at least not in the next 10-20 years.
Long term we could probably save money by, for example, building up an armed force that revolves around using the threat of nuking the hell out of other countries and doesn't bother having the expensive "boots on ground, bombs precisely on target" capability we spend so much on today. But there are a lot of reasons not to want to go down that road.
Oh, and avoid any foreign occupations, they're stupidly expensive and unjust to all involved.
If those people are basing their decision-making process on having American military forces defending them in a crisis, maybe they ought to be helping pay for the carriers. We can work out an installment plan.
Currently they're helping pay for the planes to put on the carriers, because they've placed large orders for the things...
More seriously, no other nation on the planet has decided it can spare the military budget to have the capability to bomb anyone, anywhere, on a moment's notice. Why do we need that capability if no one else has it? Why can we afford it if the rest of the world, combined, can't?
If we don't spend the money, no one will- which may well be acceptable. Go back to the days of, say, the 18th century, when nobody tried to maintain open sealanes for international commerce by force. Let warlords be warlords, if they want to play with Cold War vintage tanks and jets.
I'm a little concerned about what might happen, but you clearly aren't, and maybe I'm just being paranoid.
