The premise of the OP is to invest in infrastructure and social programs with the military budget cuts money, so you would cannot have lost jobs on your side, there are thousands of bridges right NOW that are crumbling and need fixing, and tons of police departments that don’t have adequate coverage right NOW, I can give cites for these if you don’t believe me.
So, I’d rather have safer streets and better highways and bridges and infrastructure than more dead foreigners (at our hands), this is apparently radical short sighted thinking to most of you. Maybe YOU guys have spent too much time behind the American hegemony because I certainly haven’t.
Blustering isn’t a very convincing argument. It just makes people think you’ve got nothing better to offer in defense of your position. If this is important to you, put a little more effort into it.
Hey, I never said we were any better - I’m fully aware of how horrible we acted during the de-colonization wars. The Algerian War was so bad, we don’t even talk about it. It’s a conversation taboo.
Which is one of the many, many reasons I don’t go around telling people France is a nation of benign overlords who handle power rightfully and responsibly
That being said, I wasn’t just being snippy at you - you really should read Killing Hope. One of the most depressing reads I’ve had in a long while, but an eye opener.
But I’ve repeatedly and openly acknowledged that the United States has made mistakes and done some bad things. My point has been what’s a realistic alternative?
If the United States stepped aside, who would step in? And nobody can claim it wouldn’t happen - there have always been big countries that want to push around small countries.
So if the United States decided to step down as a world power, what country do people feel could fill its place as a world power and do a better job?
And that’s not even getting into the issue that is the United States voluntarily stopped being a major power it would go from being one of the big countries to being one of the smaller countries that gets pushed around by big countries.
Germany ?
No, bear with me, I’m being half-serious here. Nazi guilt is practically a religion in Germany these days. They’re even iffy about waving their own flag outside of soccer matches. And they opted to stay out of most conflicts in my lifetime as well. If there’s any people I’d trust not to blindly support imperialism and aventurism (or handwave them in any way, shape or form) at this point, it’d be them.
Plus you know it’d be easy to rally the world against Zee Germans should they try anything funny (and they don’t have nor want The Bomb either, so…).
Or just let the impotent, fragmented U.N. handle the global military stuff. Being impotent, they wouldn’t do anything good with it. But they also probably wouldn’t do anything too terrible.
But it’s like the paradox that anyone who wants to be President is too ambitious to deserve the job. The only way Germany could be a world power would be to give up its anti-imperialism and anti-adventurism.
Same thing with the UN. If it’s impotent and fragmented, it won’t be able to prevent world problems.
This statement undermines most of anything you have to say about the military or technology.
You may not have agreed with the man’s world view, or his moral take on things (his perceived moral take on things, at least) but he was very very well versed on technology, science, and the military.
And calling him a hack is just dumb. Sure, some of what he wrote wasn’t good, but he opened the door for real science in science fiction, and created the things that are stereotypes today.
I was not aware that Robert Heinlein had a reputation for being a serious military thinker. All I have ever heard was, “Cool, he wrote the book about the movie with the bugs.” Do you have some citations where his contributions to military thinking, doctrine, or philosophy are described?
I consider defense spending to be spending by the Department of Defense. I do not consider interest on the debt, veterans programs, homeland security programs, FBI programs, or whatever else to be defense programs. Perhaps we should use the term “military spending” instead of “defense spending” to better focus the discussion on what our armed forces are doing.
I see that you are actually making a more nuanced argument than I originally thought, one that is somewhat different from what the OP proposed of dialing back military spending by a very large percentage. So I guess my comments are somewhat misplaced in that you are, indeed, taking the issue more seriously than “OMG so much money what a waste get rid of it!” I guess that’s an apology, even though I truly never meant any offense to you.
Hit the nail on the head. Power corrupts, military power corrupts milita… wait, no, that doesn’t work at all. But yes, that was my meaning.
You could always hand them over the keys for a symbolic dollar ?
Neither does the US, when it comes right down to it. Or us French, or the Brits, or NATO. We all just look out for number one and fight tooth and nail to maintain a global statu quo which, by dint of history, luck, industry, divine providence, humongous crimes or however you want to characterize it, is heavily stacked in our favour. Y’all do it even moreso than you have disproportionate means to do it, but I have little doubt any other European or even Asian superpower would do things just the same were they in your boots.
Hence the need for checks and balances - it works in government, it should work in worldwide peacekeeping as well. Two superpowers was a terrible state of affairs for just about everyone, but one superpower is still one too many. A fantasy, militarily potent U.N. dragging its feet and getting mired in dissensions at every turn would probably bode ill for the Syrian rebels of the world (not that we’re doing anything about them right now…), but then again it would also have meant nobody in Iraq would have gotten blown up. Not the worst state of affairs.
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XT however seems to have the idea that the US is into some sort of international conflict resolution, or that it would be unhappy to side with a new evil big bully if they appeared. But the US has never had any trouble in being friends with dictators. Now you hear Obama talking on TV about how unfortunate it is that the dictators are killing all those people, but they’ve been doing that for years it’s just the average American was less aware of it. And whilst all these people were being cruel, evil dictators America still managed to be friends with them.
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We are indisputably in the international conflict resolution game…because it’s in our best interests to minimize international conflicts especially in areas where we have vital interests, and especially in the medium and long terms (i.e. we don’t have a problem with short term conflicts that WE initiate if they play into some goal or theme we are trying to push forward. By the same token, we don’t have as much of an issue with conflicts that we aren’t part of as long as they aren’t in strategically vital areas).
Here’s the thing though…WE are in the drives seat. Those dictators are playing ball with us and our agenda…not the other way around. We’d be less than thrilled if the roles were reversed, especially since there is no guarantee that whoever the new big bad guy is would be doing evil shit in furtherance of our national goals and interests. I think that’s the key part you are missing here (plus, you are vastly overplaying how happy we are with dictators…usually it’s a lesser of two evils and for the greater good, ours of course, type calculation).
I’ll accept your apology only to avoid trouble as it isn’t necessary. I was only surprised at the disjoint between your comments and mine, considering how hard I’d tried to get around just such a misunderstanding, but I figured it was a misunderstanding and wasn’t offended. I should probably try to avoid inflammatory rhetoric like ‘fer cryin’ out loud’ in the future. And anyway I’m just some guy on the internet. If you or XT give me ‘the rap’ when I deserve it, well then that will be the right thing to do. I hope you’re not rendered too incautious to do so by this.
So… military pensions? It’s possible for a guy to collect one starting before he turns 40, apparently for the rest of his life. This isn’t spending ‘only’ on defense, but we can’t screw the soldiers either, but even people with good deals have to wait until 57, so how much can we wiggle this without breaking anything, and how much does it save over say 20 years?
My next door neighbor recently lost his job as it was outsourced to India.
I bet he wishes ‘our’ overseas interests were under a bit more pressure/threat!
How about instead of the taxpayer paying for ‘our’ overseas interests that we have the people benefiting from this trade foot the bill? We can put a surcharge on every item imported and exported out of this country as well as tax corporations needing protection of their trade lines and that be the budget for the military. Basically, a hotline that they can call up for protection so long as they cut a check right away.
As you can probably tell, I tend toward isolationism. People don’t seem to really like us…they seem to not want us around and that we stick our noses where they don’t belong. Screw em. Let’s pull back and save some money as the OP suggests.
How did that work out for us the last time (i.e. during the Great Depression)? It didn’t seem like fun times to me, and I’m guessing it would be a hell of a lot worse if we tried it today and pulled back all our interests and became isolationists.
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How about instead of the taxpayer paying for ‘our’ overseas interests that we have the people benefiting from this trade foot the bill?
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We do that already…it’s called ‘taxes’. Every man, woman and child in this country benefits in some way from overseas trade. Even your neighbor who lost his job to someone overseas benefits from trade. So, protecting that trade is in every single citizens best interest.
I bet he wouldn’t if he really realized what it would entail if that were the case.
So, if we take down the entire world, including ourselves, you figure they’d like us better then?
(This meme that the vast majority of people in the world dislike us is way over played around here. GO to some of these other countries and you’ll see that the meme that Americans are universally hated is just that…a meme. I’ve generally been welcomed by mainly friendly and, in many cases curious folks when I’ve traveled abroad. And regardless, even if they hate our guts, so what? THEY need that trade as well, and even if they don’t realize it and want to hate us with the heat from 10,000 suns, why should we cut off our nose to spite our face just for their short lived pleasure?)
Prior to WWI as well…and, come to think of that, prior to the Civil War as well…er, and prior to the War of 1812. Oh, and prior to the Korean War too. We never seem to learn the lesson (though I THOUGHT we had this time), which is that if you don’t prepare well for war it’s your young folks who will pay the price to re-learn the lessons. They will pay it in blood, unfortunately.
ISTM that the question should not be “Do we cut defense to help social programs” but “Has our defense spending been helpful, and how could that improve in the future, and can we reduce our spending (as a % of GDP) as a result of better foreign policy and better choices of programs to fund” and, separately, “Should we return the tax system to Carter era rates and provide the social safety net that we need?”
At this point, IMHO, there should be no talk of cutting budgets until we are out of this great recession, and until the taxes have returned to the rates that worked in the 70’s. When those two thing happen, we can then work to remove waste from government programs, like we did under Clinton / Gore.
This is not to say we should allow fraud, just that now is not the time to lay off x% of federal workers and contracts, just to save some money, and reduce a deficit.
I am by no means a hawk, and I have problems with many of our military adventures current and past. That is a separate issue from the need for the ability to project force anywhere and provide help. If the diplomats and policy makers cooperate, this can save lives by reducing violence, in a way that would not be as effective without the carrier group.
The US could easily disband the Army and the Air Force. The Navy and Marines would be more than enough to defend the US homeland, maintain a nuclear deterrent, anti-missile defence, and also topple a foreign government or 2. Maybe not a massive tank battle on the plains of central Europe but then again they never were going to win that one anyway.
Bonus: Forums poster XT remains gainfully employed.
(and they don’t have nor want The Bomb either, so…).
