Canada gets a package deal, since it’s defense is basically part of our own defense. So, how much of the world is left when you take out Europe and North America?
As to the article, here are some parts of it:
This is part of the reason why more money is being requested for defense on this budget (Trump’s budget, which has zero chance of being passed…probably less than Obama’s had of being READ).
To your specific point (I assume):
In light of the first paragraph you can see why the Army would want to focus on other things if it thinks it currently has ‘enough tanks’. But look at the funding levels here. Yes, $120 million is a lot of money for you and me…in the context of the budget though?
Might want to ask yourself…WHY is the budget a ‘tight budget’ wrt the military? Especially if you are going to use this as a cite to demonstrate whatever point you were trying to make.
To answer the OP: My WAG is that an American military 1/2 the size as current could still get the job done, albeit with little room for losses or spares.
Let’s say the mission is to win a conventional WWIII against Russia or China.
You’d need your NATO and Japan/SK/other allies to really bulk up their own militaries. Which they may well do in fear, if they see the US downsizing its own forces.
You’d definitely want to retain a strong nuclear deterrent. Perhaps get rid of the land-based ICBMs, but the B-2s and B-21s definitely need to stay as nuke bombers, and also keep the SSBNs as well - including the new SSBN replacement submarine class.
You want to keep all the F-22s, along with perhaps 800 Lightning IIs. Sell off all F-16s and F-15Cs to allies such as Taiwan and Iraq, who might be happy to acquire secondhand jets on the cheap. Keep the F-15E Strike Eagles and Super Hornets.
Downsize the Army and Marines; focus on AirSea Battle instead of land. No more boots-on-the-ground wars. Make the military all about drones, albeit still keeping some Abrams and Strykers, etc.
Trim off as many personnel as possible, to cut down on that side of costs.
Keep a smaller carrier fleet. It will leave some global hot spots uncovered, but that’s too bad.
To beat China in a war would be much easier than beating Russia; stealth bombers and SSNs could make the winning difference at relatively little cost to American life. Russia on the other hand would be a major handful, especially in a Baltic-states scenario.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
To answer the OP: My WAG is that an American military 1/2 the size as current could still get the job done, albeit with little room for losses or spares.
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Just walk me through this one part. What do you envision that, let’s say the Navy, would do if its budget was cut in half? What do you think they would spend the money they have remaining on, exactly? What would it mean for fleet readiness, for instance? What about maintenance? Do you envision that the Navy would be able to support much of the fleet? What about the crews, since they make up a large percentage of the budget?
Just as a hint, cutting the Navy’s budget in half would probably mean we’d have to mothball most of the carriers and most of the support ships. We wouldn’t have the crews or the ability to maintain the whole fleet or even most of it. Which would mean we’d be operating with a few carriers in VERY limited ways. You seem to have the idea that cutting the budget in half would naturally simply mean half the combat power, but it doesn’t work that way. Less crews and less hulls means we don’t have any slack for downtime or maintenance…which means we have to scale back operations across the board. It’s actually more complicated even than that, but a cut of half the budget would probably mean 1/4 or less of the current force projection…at a time when we’ve already been drawing down on this for years, and already the fleet is under strain because there aren’t enough hulls and crews to give enough downtime for everything needed. The same is true, more or less, for the other services.
You’ll have a great deal of trouble convincing me that a defense budget greater than the next seven nations combined isn’t already more than enough than is necessary to fulfill its missions.
Spending efficiency, on the other hand, is a completely different issue. Regardless, the solution isn’t increasing the defense budget by 10% at the cost of a multitude of more needed programs throughout the rest of the government.
[QUOTE=Johnny Ace]
You’ll have a great deal of trouble convincing me that a defense budget greater than the next seven nations combined isn’t already more than enough than is necessary to fulfill its missions.
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I’m not trying to convince you or anyone else about anything. I’ve found that on this subject especially people knows what they knows, and are impervious to convincing. I do wish you and others would actually give this some thought before rattling off meaningless phrases like next seven nations budgets, blah blah blah. Consider…what is the MISSION of those next 7 nations militaries? Is it to project power globally? Answer…no. None of them do more than project power regionally. In fact, in the region of all 7 (and all the rest of the nations in the top 50) of those nations, the US has interests and projects power. Their mission is different from ours, so there isn’t any meaningful comparison. If the US military had a mission to simply be a regional North American power then we could fulfill that mission for the same cost as Russia or China does that same mission.
Now, if you want to talk about changing the US militaries mission, that’s a different thing. THAT would be a meaningful argument. But I’m confident that this tired old phrase will continue to be trotted out both here on the SD and elsewhere because the people making it literally don’t see how silly it is. They think it’s a profound statement instead of something that causes serious eye rolling when it’s trotted out.
Why, then, is that the mission? How is it that seven other nations can get by without this power projection, but the US has to do it? That seems like a question worth addressing.
I mean, the immediate inference one would draw would have to do with trade: the military has become the security force serving the needs of business. If that is the case, perhaps we should compel those businesses who are its primary beneficiaries to do a lot more to fund their security force.
[QUOTE=eschereal]
Why, then, is that the mission?
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Because the US government and presumably the people electing them have made that the US’s mission for over 50 years now. Simple as that. Whether we SHOULD be doing that mission or not is really the question. As long as it is the mission, however, that’s what it costs to do it properly. In fact, our military budget is really too low to really do the mission right.
Well, the other countries on the list don’t want to project power globally…or, if they do, they know it’s going to take them years or decades of spending to get to the point where they can. China seems to want to go this route, which is why their budgets have been going up for years. Last I checked it was about a fifth of what the US’s budget is and climbing. Russia would LIKE to…in the old Soviet days they did in fact. But they don’t have the economy to sustain it. The Europeans don’t seem to have any interest in it…but then, they have us, so they don’t really need to.
The military doesn’t serve the needs of ‘business’…they serve the perceived needs and strategic goals of the US. Trade and business are part of that and part of the militaries mission is to protect US trade and interests. Since we are a global trade nation that means we have global interests. As noted, since no one else is in the global military projection business (either friend or foe), and since it’s been deemed something important enough to continue to spend such sums, we are doing it. Whether that continues to be the case is something that I think is worthy of discussion, to be sure. It’s certainly a lot more interesting that folks who don’t understand WHY we spend what we spend speculating on what they think we should be spending because the next 7 nations military spending is less.
No, the two-wars strategy comes out of the desire for stability. The logic behind it says that if you are only equipped to fight one adversary at a time, then every time you have to do so you commit all your forces, and that leaves you vulnerable to other opportunistic adversaries around the world. That’s how regional conflicts become world wars.
If anything, the logic of this policy comes from WWII, not the cold war. Would Japan have been as aggressive if most allies had not already been largely tied up in European wars? The U.S. was on the outside, but Japan thought it could break the U.S.'s will to fight by wiping out its Pacific fleet, especially because the U.S. was becoming increasingly entangled in the war in Europe.
What you don’t want to have happen is to have to go to war in say, Syria, and then have China or Russia decide that you had committed your forces to that conflict and that if there was ever a time to take more territory, this was it.
In general, the reason the U.S.'s military budget is so large is for the same reason it’s protected from invasion - all its potential major adversaries and allies are oceans away. Putin can project power by marching his forces overland a few miles. America can only project power by floating carrier groups, and through treaties with allies that allow them to stage in foreign lands. This is all much, much more expensive than just maintaining a home force.
The reason all this is necessary is because the world is globalized, and it’s impossible to just withdraw your military and deal from an isolated continent. Anyone who thinks the U.S. can just take its marbles and go home should have had a wakeup call in the last 8 years as America tried to ‘lead from behind’. The result was almost immediate increases in aggression from the Russians and Chinese, the rise of more bad actors in the Middle East, and the beginning of a restructuring of global economics around new power centers.
Another reason for a large U.S. global presence is to prevent nuclear proliferation. If the U.S. didn’t guarantee the security of South Korea and Japan by staging large numbers of soldiers near the border to North Korea and through the military guarantees given to Japan after WWII in exchange for their de-militarization, South Korea and Japan would both be nuclear powers today. And no doubt many other countries as well. A world where dozens of countries have nuclear weapons is a world that will see at least one of them used in conflict. As it is, our failure to prevent proliferation in Pakistan and India is still one of the biggest threats to world peace.
Yet another reason for a large military budget is to bind allies to the U.S., and to have influence over them. For example, the U.S.'s military aid to Egypt has resulted in a lot of westernized Egyptian military people who have trained with Americans and who provide intelligence and insight to Americans and who provide some buffer against radicalization. In addition, Egypt is much more likely to stay in line if it knows that stepping out could cost them billions of dollars in aid.
The U.S. gains an awful lot from having a robust military, and has a lot to lose by degrading it.
Lets say you want a carrier task force for the Pacific full time. As I recall that actually will require 3 carriers. 1 to be out to sea, 1 just in port for short term maintenance and the 3rd in port for long term maintenance. Therefore they cycle in and out of that 3 carrier rotation for one area to be covered.
And crews and support ships. What we have BEEN doing, since Clinton I think, is running hulls and crews more and doing less maintenance (especially among the support ships)…which is why we recently had a situation where we didn’t have a carrier in a theater for something like 3 months. If some of these guys got their way it would be more along the lines of what regions we HAVE a carrier in…and hope like hell we guessed right where the few operational should be if there is a dust up.
Yes, well, you often have that arrangement within a fleet (interchanged with “task force”, my bad) during peace time. But the rotation scheme can easily be scrapped and you’ll have two carriers loaded up at sea when things get hot. The most frightening thing about a carrier force is that it moves very fast and it’s precise location is very hard to determine. That’s because of its inherent striking range.
Since the MRC concept has come up repeatedly. Responding to the justification of why it was the standard is as good a place as any for a couple big concepts related to it and where we are now.
The concept was always to be able to win two MRCs in conjunction with our regional partners not alone. When our partners are spending less that pushes more onus onto the US to make up the difference to achieve that level of capability.
We’ve already abandoned the two MRC concept for what I jokingly call a one and a half MRC strategy. With the cuts that started as Iraq wound down the concept became the ability to fight one MRC with a strong force for a second. The second MRC force serves as a deterrent by being strong enough to at least make success for potential opponents very costly. Best case that second force is strong enough to delay till the first MRC is handled and additional forces can be shifted to win.
Being able to handle the demands of both Iraq and Afghanistan required an expansion of our ground forces from where they were in 2001. It also required using our reserve components at relatively high levels more as an operations reserve than the older concept of them as a strategic reserve for MRCs. We’ve cut back from even the numbers we had in 2001.
After the 2013 sequester budget cuts, even with already programmed force structure cuts, key senior civilian members in the Obama administration were raising concerns about either having to make significant further cuts or face a hollow, less prepared, but appropriately sized force. The two year budget deal that ultimately came out of the 2016 budget process did fix a lot of those issues by replacing a decent chunk of the sequester cuts. Thanks to both Obama and John Boehner, in his parting achievement, we avoided the too small or hollow dilemma.
We’ve seen small issues still in the campaign against Islamic State. CENTCOM has required transfers of war stocks held for conflicts in other Combatant Commands to maintain that ground and air campaign. Just handling IS, even with the OCO funding provided, has stressed the ability to maintain the operation without some robbing of capability to respond for other Regional Contingencies. That’s troubling if you are at all concerned about another MRC.
China and Russia, our two major peer/near peer potential adversaries, have been improving technologically thereby reducing the systems overmatch we’ve long maintained. That has the effect of reducing our relative capability even without cuts on our part. That puts pressure on us spending more and/or better to maintain relative capabilities.
It’s easy to just point to issues where we could reduce less effective spending (like another round of BRAC.) It’s also easy to throw money at the problem without it being effective. Those are peripheral to what is the core issue IMO. Our current less than two MRC capability is under pressure from current spending levels and allocation methods. Some changes by both the US and it’s partners is probably necessary to maintain that capability.
My sarcastic response would be, let’s let the Canadians invade and welcome them! But more seriously, a military is a deterrent just as much as it is a killing force. There’s nary a soldier that wants to kill someone; our presence is usually enough.
I admire your stance and the absolute moral certainty you project.
However for me I would prefer to insure that others don’t murder or enslave myself, my family, extended family or any others for that matter. There are many in the world that would do just that in a heartbeat given the chance. Therefore the need for the military.
As someone mentioned up thread, it depends on what you want the American Military to do. What do you want the world to look like and what are you prepared to spend to have it look like that.
Since WWII, the world has been largely shaped by American foreign policy backed up by the American military. There have certainly been failures (Vietnam for example). But on the other hand there have been more successes. Europe not being overrun by the Soviet Union post WWII, and there are 50 million South Koreans who are pretty pleased with the U. S. Military.
Saying that the military is over bloated is an over simplification as well. There have been budget reductions over the last few years that have forced the military to choose carefully. But any organization with one million plus employees will have issues and waste.
We’ve also seen what a power vacuum will look like when the U. S. military isn’t a player. Look at Russian advances and Syria. The military when used correctly keeps the lid on much of this. I don’t think NATO is the answer either. Genocide was going on in Europe and NATO didn’t do a think until the U.S. military stepped in.
So it’s easy to bitch about the U.S. Military. But it’s a relativity small percentage of the budget and I don’t think we’d like to world if it wasn’t there keeping the bad guys at bay. I’m reminded of a quote from Three Days of the Condor:
Higgins: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they’re running out. Ask 'em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask 'em. They’ll just want us to get it for 'em!
Heinlein was, of course, completely full of shit. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “love your enemy” and “offer the other cheek” and “bless those who curse you” and “do good to those who harm you.”
