Hypothetical scenario:
It is the year 2017, and a new President is in the Oval Office. This President is not afraid to make bold and drastic changes.
You’ve been assigned to draw up the defense budget for the upcoming fiscal year. You have complete freedom and flexibility to allocate it however you please, within several conditions:
A) Overall defense spending is to be **halved **(from the level it was at in recent years.)
B) The new U.S. military, however small it may be, must still be capable of defeating Russia and/or China entirely conventionally, combating terrorism in the Middle East or anywhere else as needed, and still take on miscellaneous missions anywhere in the world as needed.
C) Congress must approve this new budget. In other words, it has to be “politically acceptable.”
I think it could be doable if:
The number of personnel is cut back to only a few hundred thousand;
Arms sales to US allies such as Japan, Israel, NATO partners, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. are significantly ramped up, in order to strengthen them militarily while the US military is cut back. Of course, if they don’t need or don’t want more arms sales, then this becomes unnecessary;
The U.S. cuts back its number of carriers, SSNs, F-35s, etc. to the minimum level needed for superiority over two major foes like Russia and China simultaneously, but not exceeding it;
The U.S. puts ever more emphasis on technologies that allow a ship, aircraft or vehicle to do ever more work in one single platform than before.
The nuclear arsenal is trimmed back in size, but still remains more than capable of MAD deterrence against Russia, China or anyone.
The U.S. pulls out of as many foreign deployments as possible.
New defense contracts emphasis affordability rather than capability (to a certain extent.)
This is a complete nonstarter. You can’t change the entire post-war military and foreign policy in the United States in a single yearly budget. You can’t immediately halve the budget of an organization that spends more than half a trillion dollars per year and has long-term project and investments. You can’t come up with any sort of political magic that would allow Congress to sign off on such a budget. You can’t immediately reduce an organization that has (according to Wikipedia) about 1.3 million active members to a few hundred thousand.
This is just silly. Instead, it might be more useful to discuss why the military budget of the United States is so large and what’s keeping it that way. Do you have any figures, for example, what exactly it would cost (in terms of money, manpower, technology, etc.) to fight a war with Russia and China simultaneously?
Military spending among allied countries is a game of prisoner’s dilemma; a certain amount of combined military might is needed, but no one wants to pay for it. Right now, the US is the backstop of the free world, and to some degree subsidizes the existence of most every other allied nation. If we drastically cut our military spending, there’s no guarantee other countries will pick up the slack, or that they even could substantially change their military spending in the short term.
In the real world, Atlas can’t just shrug and hope someone else will pick up the weight.
Stop paying soldiers during their first enlistment term. Service is not compulsory, but anyone wishing to enlist does not get paid until he/she has served 2 years. After 2 years, one can decide to get out and enjoy their GI Bill, or reenlist and start getting paid.
Close all bases in Europe except those in Germany or Italy.
Get rid of the Marine Corps.
Cut the Navy in Half.
Encourage states to make up the difference by increasing the size of their national guards.
Go ahead and cut the Navy in half again.
Airforce? Let them all live in old Army installations and barracks and eat Army food. But seriously, STOP paying them extra money for “harsh living conditions” when they are forced to live in the same quality place as everyone else gets. Hell, that alone would probably cut the entire defense budget in half.
I was not aware that soldiers are granted magical powers that allow them to exist for two years without eating.
OP–according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the global average for military spending is about 2.5% of GDP. Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, France, and China all spend less than that. (But China is so much larger than most nations that we can’t take much comfort from that.) The UK spends exactly that. Russia and the US spend more.
In other words, the vast majority of our major allies spend far less on their defense than they theoretically “should.”
Russia and China together have about 3.1 million active-duty military personnel. The US has a little under 1.5 million. France, Germany, Italy, and the UK combined add another 743,000.
Now, things would depend somewhat on who was doing the invading, and where, but all of NATO together would have a hard time NOW fighting Russia and China simultaneously. Forget about cutting back–if anything, the US needs to be expanding its military.
Years ago, possibly during the Cold War, the Center for Defense Information drew up a military budget sufficient (allegedly but they have expertise) to defend the US. Military spending would be 2% of GDP.
In 2010-2014 military spending in the US was 3.8% of GDP, even with the wars we fought. So yeah, I’m thinking it could be done if you ignore that power abhors a vacuum.
For all those who are wringing their hands: get real. Comparing Russia’s drunken and conscripted soldiers to the US’s trained volunteer ones is apples and basketballs. Far better to look at spending. Rank the countries by military expenditure. The US is position number one. Our spending is about equal to the following 9 combined. That would be China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India and South Korea. A total of two of those are our competitors. Let’s face it, you could double military spending and the fact-free brigade would be parroting the same nonsense, talking in vague terms of weakness and strength as if this were a body building contest.
I have one overall philosophy that I think everyone needs to hear. The world would be such a better place if everyone understood:
America does not need such a big military. The only reason she has one is not for defense, but, to intimidate all the other countries and dominate the world as a superpower. The idea that America needs such a big military to defend herself is a COMPLETE FALSEHOOD. The United States of America is the second hardest country to invade on the whole planet. The only other country that would be harder to invade is Mongolia. Mongolia lies in between China and Russia. No outside country will ever invade Mongolia, they have to go through China or Russia first. It won’t happen. America is in a very good strategic position as well. Virtually non-invadable. Canada on the North, Mexico on the South, and two large oceans to cross on the East and West. I am — not — saying the United States of America can’t be attacked. But for it to be attacked, invaded and permanently occupied is preposterous. It will never happen. In addition to the nearly insurmountable geographic difficulties is the fact that so many Americans own guns.
The idea that the United States needs such a large military to defend our country or to defend our freedom is a complete falsehood.
Actually I think it’s more complicated. I think the US has evolved to become the necessary hegemon, so I’d disagree with the OP’s scenario. That said, I’d support the concept of burden sharing, phased in over a long time period.
In other words I’m a lefty liberal by US standards and a militarist/hawk by world standards.
America’s armed forces are not merely to protect our country, but also to protect our allies, trading partners and strategic interests. Bad actors like Russia and China exist and are willing to conquer our allies by force if necessary. Evil exists and we need to take steps to stop it.
Hegemony leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others
How is that a good thing? For the rest of the world I mean? Can you give me examples of where American Hegemony has actually benefited the world? I’m biased enough to state that I think no such examples exist, but, I’m not so biased that if I were given such a (valid) example that I would dismiss it.
1- Hey, I usually like reading your posts and allways wanted to ask, is your user name from All Along The Watchtower? It is, right?
2- I can accept the Idea that we need to be strong to protect our allies. Really, I can. But contradicting that basic concept is the fact that our Military is hardly ever actually deployed that way. Is there a balance to be achieved here?
Most of them have pretty robust domestic arms industries already and seem to get all they want of US designed systems . Taiwan might be the only customer wanting more… because the US has to consider how much every sale will annoy the Chinese.
That’s an expansion of the capability planned for in the current programmed and projected cuts. Those cuts are based on being able to fight and win one major regional conflict while delaying in a second. Win one while not losing the second is the current planning guidance.
We expand research and development to acquire new capabilities but we focus on cost more than those capabilities? We’ve already put significant effort into those technologies. It probably won’t be cheap to expand them even further.
Korea’s probably an easy one. Their army is large, well equipped, and supported by a large economy. Our European based maneuver forces are about on par quantity-wise with the sum of Lithuania and Estonia. There’s not much to cut without being irrelevant on the ground if there was a fight with Russia. Okinawa serves as a forward base for the Marines more than being about the defense of Japan. Some potential there but aside from pulling them CONUS forward basing in the Pacific is forward basing with the associated extra cost; moving will be costly too. What else do we cut? Sinai Peacekeeping? AFRICOM? Kosovo? A lot of what we do is relatively small forces. They all add up but each one is a separate call on whether the small cost is worth the reduction of risk of things being more costly later.
You want us to cut the military by 80% (from 1.1M to 300K) while at the same time being able to defeat Russia and China simultaneously, while achieving and then keeping peace in the middle east?
Anything else while we are at it? Cure cancer? Solve world hunger?
You’re smoking something if you honestly think this is possible. We can defeat Russia and China simultaneously now, you know that right?
This is so far outside the realm of possibility is ridiculous. Talk about fighting ignorance.
I’m confused. Are Russia and China attacking us simultaneously? Does anyone seriously think that this is a likely scenario? Russia is about as militarily aggressive as you will find, and they are terminally bogged down in the Ukraine right now, and will be subsidizing the Crimea for the rest of our lives. For China, they are still having difficulty with Tibet and Taiwan. Neither country is in a good position for a trans-Pacific military campaign, and more to the point there would be absolutely no benefit to them. There are plenty of small countries outside NATO for them to wave their swords at for political gain at home.
We need a ginormous military because, having aquired one, any reduction is a blow to our massive self-esteem. A couple of replies to this thread are as if we suggested actually shortening America’s dick rather than discussing a hypothetical.
One of the reasons that our military is so large is that we possibly learned a hard lesson after WWII. Every branch of the military had been, just after the war ended, cut to the bone and beyond. And then along came Korea and we almost got our ass handed to us by a bunch of North Koreans. Anybody remember the Pusan Perimeter?
I don’t remember how much the military had been cut, and I’m too lazy right now to look it up, but it was a LOT.
I know a lot of Dopers will say that we had no business in Korea in the first place. I suggest that you ask the South Koreans if they would like to be living under the iron rule of North Korea.