If the OP is followed to its logical conclusion, which I can only assume means cutting off military aid as well. You get wars lots of them and severe disruption in global trade, both of which would do untold damage to the same American economy you are trying to protect. Not to say that we can’t better spend our money and use more of it at home but we have to be very careful because…
China & Russia as the guys in charge, awesome. That will be great
The Islamic Republic of Iranq
I was going to make a long list of possible outcomes and these are only maybes but both are bad and reasonably likely. Anyhoo my 2 cents
First, it’s unlikely there’d be another “big bully”; it’s too much money for too little return. This isn’t the 19th century, military imperial doesn’t pay anymore. Second, if there was such a thing and we found it profitable of course it would be “acceptable” for us to join with them; we have no real standards beyond profit = good. Just look at all the murderous tyrants we’ve supported and imposed over the years. And third, if China wants to stomp on a northern province that can do that now and our military wouldn’t do a thing to intervene. They have nukes, and even if they didn’t China is too large and powerful; we only attack targets we think will be easy victims. We’re the world’s mugger, not the world’s policeman.
I’d guess that trying to rapidly ramp back up to offensive capability after the OP’s proposed strategy causes the world to fly apart will be pretty pricey.
That said, there certainly are ways to replace current power-projection systems with less pricey substitutes, i.e. swap out a carrier group for a squadron of land-based stealth bomber drones with global range. The technology is almost at the point where virtually all air-support missions can be based in the U.S. itself, for a significant savings. Give it another decade.
Of course, the real point of defense spending isn’t just to have a mega-military, but to create thousands of jobs for Americans, particularly in congressional districts that have come to rely on local industry and bases.
As a purely incidental note, The Asylum (a film company noted for making cheap movies with titles nearly identical to major blockbusters, with the clear intent to profit by confusion) released a movie called American Battleship which in several ways was actually a better movie than the more expensive mainstream flick Battleship. I mention this only because the eponymous ship, the USS Iowa, is used in the film as an EMP-insensitive massively-armored slug-thrower, and sometimes you need that sort of thing.
In the sentence just before the one you quoted here I said basically the same thing. I don’t think it’s for the reasons you believe here, but essentially I don’t think anyone would or could take our place as the preeminent military power on the planet, at least not for a long time.
Blah…blah blah. Blah blah blah. Yes, yes…we are the murderous muggers of the world, etc etc. However, in terms you might understand we’re like most peoples concept of the all powerful mob bosses…no buddy gonna fuck with our territory, see? Otherwise it’s concrete galoshes…see? We’ll plug youse with our 45’s if you fuck with us…and then put their favorite horses head in their beds wit dem if they fuck with us…see?
And stuff. Cept we won’t be able to anymore, and what you’ll have is an all out gang war for our former territory. No, it’s not the 19th century anymore…because we became the new sheriff (or gang lord if it helps you understand better) in town in the post WWII era.
Who protects the UK’s international trade, or France’s, Germany’s or Japan’s? Their militaries are a small fraction of ours, and yet they don’t seem to have any major problem with trade disruptions.
I assume you’re going to say “That’s because they have the U.S. looking out for them.” If that’s true, then why should it be us paying such a disproportionate share?
Quite obviously, we do. It’s one of the perks of being our ally.
Because it’s in our best interest to do so, and we willingly took on the role decades ago. SOMEONE had to do it, and frankly we chose to put ourselves in this position.
Okay, if the United States decided to adopt a strictly “defend our homeland” policy, we could cut back from our current 1,458,219 to around 300,000. And reduce the military budget from its current $711,000,000,000 to around $70,000,000,000.
Short term outcome? A significant drop in government spending.
Long term outcome? We’ll have to increase our defense spending in 2030 when China begins basing troops in northern Mexico.
Or did your plan for the United States to go on a strictly defensive plan mean that every other country was supposed to do the same?
Garbage. We aren’t the peacekeepers of the world; we ignore wars all the time if we don’t care about them. Nor have we been very good at stopping them when we do care about them. We haven’t seen any repeats of WWI or II not because of some imaginary “Pax Americana”, but because wars of conquest are no longer profitable. Remember how our conquest of Iraq was going to pay for itself? It didn’t. China (or India or the EU or…) isn’t going to take our place because they aren’t dumb enough to bother to try. We are spending a ridiculous amount more than everyone else on the military, and its main effects are to get lots of random people killed, and lose America power & influence.
Does anyone actuially believe European countries will fight a war among themselves? If not, what’s a reasonable troop strength? I’d use the excess to militarize our southern border.
I could imagine another Balkan flareup, and Russia/Chechnya could go another round, but if there’s violence in a western European nation, it’ll probably be a civil war following an economic collapse.
Not necessarily something the U.S. need (or should) get involved with. Maybe the U.S. giving up its massive military advantage invites a new Cold War with the now-parity Russians.
Would it come to that point in twenty years? No, probably not. But it would be heading in that direction. Politics abhors a vacuum. If the United States removed itself from global politics, other countries (like China) would advance their own interests in our absence.
“Advance their interests” is not the same as "“global military expansionism”. At this point in history it is in fact pretty much the opposite of global military expansionism; you just end up bogged down in expensive military conflicts and commitments with little or nothing to show for them, like America has. If China or someone else moves in to gain influence in Mexico, it’s far more likely that it would be in the form of economic and diplomatic ties, not throwing away money on troops. The rest of the world has us as an object lesson about how military supremacy in this day and age is just a money pit.
They *could *have. It’s certainly very doable to reach Lybia by jet from southern France, and god knows France has a naval presence in the Med. As for the British, they have Harriers and the helicarriers to launch them IIRC (and could have “borrowed” airports from the French or another S. European ally like Italy).
They didn’t really care to, that’s all. As long as you’ll be waving your big dick military around, we’ll be more than happy to let you do the heavy lifting ;).
Because it serves your interests. It’s not like having bases in almost every country on the face of the earth doesn’t allow for economic/diplomatic leverage… Europe might be riding the U.S. coat tails on the military front to some extent, but the coat tails wouldn’t be there to ride if the US didn’t ultimately benefit from the statu quo, both domestically (weeeh, military procurements !) and abroad.
I guess those other countries didn’t get the memo. India and China are actively seeking overseas military bases. There’s currently, in fact, a diplomatic confrontation between China and India because both of these countries are attempting to convince the Maldives to give it basing rights and shut out its rival.
Agreed. Beyond that lesson there is always the cutting edge of technology to consider. We could massively slice the defense budget and pour even a trickle of the cut into serious R&D and remain the technical top dogs in warfare more or less permanently, barring some sort of crazy-ass science revolutionizing scenario that just happened to occur in one of the other extremely advanced countries.
That would be $215 billion by my back-of-the-hand calculation, which would still be the largest defense budget spent by any country on Earth. (Canada’s defense budget has been climbing in the last ten years.)
I’m a bit surprised to report that Canada is the world’s 14th (or maybe 13th or 15th; it depends who you believe) largest military spender, but Problem #1 with making these comparisons is that rich countries put a lot of their defense spending into salaries. A Canadian soldier is paid a very handsome wage; a second year corporal makes from $53000 to $65000 a year plus benefits just working on a nice safe base in Canada. Somehow I doubt folks serving in the Indian army are pulling down that kind of dough. So when you look at Western military budgets versus powerful not-so-rich countries like India or China you have to bear in mind that they’re getting a lot more soldiers for their buck.
Anyway, back to the USA; another Part of the problem in this discussion is that in military terms the difference between “offense” and “defense” isn’t really a clear one. Okay, overseas bases are out. But as has been pointed out, an ICBM force, especially one mounted in submarines, is an awesome defensive weapon. But why carrier groups? A non-continguous country with a coastline as huge as the USA has an obvious defensive benefit if they also possess naval supremacy over the oceans surrounding them. So where, precisely, do you draw the line between offense and defense?
I really don’t think that line is drawn at $200 billion; it’s hard for be to believe that line can be lower than Canada’s on a per capita basis; geographically, it strikes me as obviously being a harder country to defend, and as it happens it’s a country with more enemies. I think a USA truly invested in self defense would spend way more than $200 billion, probably twice that.
They didn’t even need to operate from France. Both French and British jets (Tornadoes, Typhoons and Rafales) operated from bases in the south of Italy.
All RAF and RN Harriers were retired from service in 2010 in preparation for the introduction of the F-35 (which has proven to be a mistake, with the F-35 program seemingly moving backwards).
One reason that US involvement was necessary is that both UK and French air power is in transition. The Typhoon and Rafale are being introduced in small numbers, and their predecessors (Tornado, Jaguar, Harrier, Mirage 2000, etc.) are being stood down. Neither aircraft is fully operational yet, which makes operating them alone problematic. For example, RAF Typhoons were accompanied by Tornados on ground attack missions in Libya because their pilots hadn’t been cleared to perform their own target designation yet.
I’m not seeing why defense spending would scale directly with population size. I could see it scaling with border length or overall geography, but defense depends more on who you are defending yourself against than anything else.