Spinoff from this thread about Obama’s proposed “leaner” defense budget. If our only concern were defense-from-invaders, we could make do with the scale of military establishment we had in 1930 (smaller than Poland’s; which was not enough to defend Poland from a two-front invasion as it turned out, but they have no natural defenses, we do). That defense budget of ours that adds up to more than the next 10 countries’ combined, it’s all about long-distance force-projection capacity. But that’s an incredibly expensive thing to maintain, and we need to ask ourselves – periodically, and preferably every budget year – how much long-distance force-projection capacity do we really need? And why do we even need to be a global imperial military superpower anyway? Jefferson wouldn’t have liked that.
Well, there are bad guys, and sometimes, military force is the only answer.
Personally, I’d like to see it handled more by an alliance of good guys – NATO is a nice example – so that the U.S. could spend a whole lot less, and others could spend a bit more.
I don’t have any respect for isolationism; I think that the world needs democracies to be strong enough to act outside their own borders. I think the world needs a “global policeman.” I just wish it was a shared duty, and not dominated by the U.S.
The really interesting development is not so much reducing the Defenese budget (that had to happen anyway), or that the overwhelming majority is from the Army and Marines, but that our new focus is on the Asia-Pacific rim.
I can’t wait to see what closing our German bases does to our lackadaisical European NATO allies.
I’m no military strategist, but we can’t even conquer a couple of third world countries like Iraq and Afghanistan with our military. Winning a foreign war when the people don’t want us there hasn’t worked out for us (Vietnam too).
So that has to factor in IMO. Even if we have a superior military, if the people don’t want us there we will eventually leave one way or another. That puts a giant crimp in our ability to display force overseas, knowing that extremely poor, corrupt third world countries can run an insurgency until we leave (not that I’m suggesting we say in Iraq or Vietnam).
However, our force projection is good because we can bring down an official government in a few weeks. The official Iraqi military and state fell in under a couple of months. There is some influence to your opponents knowing you can bring down their government and decimate their military in under a month.
I don’t know how valuable that is to us though. If anything I’d assume that having a good air force and special operations units would be more important because we are more willing to use those (since they are cheaper and the public don’t get as upset about it). That is how Libya fell.
Conquest is easy, governing the occupied territories afterward is what’s hard. Especially for a society as squeamish as the US.