I don’t know why people are criticizing the OP so much. Donald Rumsfeld proved we could invade and defeat a country with a much smaller, but more technological, military than what the generals said was necessary. As far as what happened after May 2003, well, you go to war with the army you have, right, Velocity?
Yes. Russia would actually have a great deal of difficulty conquering the Ukraine in its entirety - eastern Ukraine is another matter. Much of the discussion here is long on feeling and short on fact.
Yeah like I said I’m a hawk by global standards. The best example though would be Japan. Their non-aggressive posture is premised upon the US security umbrella. Generally speaking it’s understood that while the US does have interests, it doesn’t operate on the Roman model. Meaning, we don’t just colonize countries, at least anymore. (We did in the Philippines though.) The world security structure is premised upon the US’s big guns. I’m not claiming that we always have to operate things in that manner. Just that a prudent path to more equitable burden sharing would take a while.
That the US should actively pursue such a path is ultra-liberal stuff in a US context. To my knowledge there aren’t any serious people discussing it in anything but the most incremental manner. Now the US has adjusted its troop concentrations in Europe and Japan in the past. But nobody is seriously contemplating a distant future where the US has only 4 aircraft carriers. We have 10 today. France has one. China has a training ship and it has its problems. Russia has 1. Discussion of US military weakness is fantastical - a matter of imagination only.
These are mutually exclusive. I’m not sure we could do it NOW, with the steady drawing down of our military, let alone if someone tried to cut the budget in half in a year.
Good luck with that one. 
Again, this is mutually exclusive to the first point. It would be like saying 'well, we don’t really need all of this social spending so we want you to cut the social spending parts of the budget by half (we aren’t going to bother with details like what all ‘social spending’ includes), but we want it to do the same thing it does now and congress has to approve it so that it’s ‘politically acceptable’. Not going to happen for the same reason.
How are a ‘few hundred thousand’ going to meet all of the requirements? Do you even understand how the military is structured or where the personnel are and what they do? Here’s a hint…the majority of them aren’t fighters, they support the fighters in various ways. Cutting the entire military (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, presumably the Coast Guard as well) would gut the military (besides putting literally millions out on the streets looking for jobs in a compressed time frame).
Let me put all of this in a different perspective. Let’s say you own a company that provides support. Let’s say you have 20 people who do the work of providing support and 10 people who do the other jobs to make the company operate. Now, let’s say that you have to man your support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. Your 20 people are working but not overworked or over stressed as things are. Now, you get the brilliant idea that you are going to save money, so you decide you are going to cut your staff in half…instead of 30 employees you are going to cut it to 15. They have the same requirements and jobs, but now there are half as many…AND, your core business, the support side has actually lost more, since as I pointed out only 20 were doing the support part and 10 supporting them…now it’s 15 total. Your workers are now stretched VERY thin and working a lot more, and probably not doing a very good job of meeting your core requirements anymore while being stressed to the max. Ooops…Joe is sick this week. NOW what do you do? Oh, and Mary is having a baby…so sad (for you) because now she will be out a month or two, plus will be missing some other days in the run up to baby.
This is what you are doing with your OP. You haven’t really changed the requirements on the military…they haven’t really changed at all in the last few decades, really. Yet they have been slowly starved of resources while in fact the number of threats has not substantially changed, nor has their mission globally. NOW you want to cut their budget in half (without actually understanding what that means…do you know what most of the budget for the military is for or where the money is spent? I doubt you do).
Basically, it’s a horrible idea that is bad even if we leave aside the fact that politically you’d have to have a left wing (not even a Liberal) president AND Congress who were also really stupid to even contemplate doing this (and they would probably be voted out in the next election cycle as the cluster fuck reached biblical proportions).
I believe the poster is a career Army man, hence his suggestions of disbanding the Marines, toughening up the Air Force, and slashing the Navy in half (twice!). I am intrigued by the idea of an initial, short, unpaid two-year enlistment period. Would this help sift through the chaff of the incoming recruits, Bear? Encourage a more career-oriented military?
And yet the British did it on two separate occasions.
You remind me of a possibly apocryphal story told about post-Revolutionary times. Some legislator proposed a law that the American army should never number more than 3,000 men. George Washington agreed–on the condition that Congress should also pass a law stating that no enemy should invade with more than 2,000 men.
In other words, you are willing to put a quite remarkable degree of trust in the good intentions of other people.
Providing dining facilities is merely another form of payment. SOMEBODY has to provide the electricity, etc.
It sounds as if people believe that invasion is a realistic threat in 2015 (or 2025, or 2050). I do not believe invasion is a serious threat, nor has been for the last century. For those who believe that someone might be inclined to invade the US were the defenses weaker, could you explain why you think so?
No colonies? Who needs colonies when you can get all the Timber and Livestock and Mineral Rights on pennies to the dollar? If we had colonies we’s actually owe those people something. I’m not sure what you’re really advocating outside of Capitalist trading Hegemony.
Right. And they couldn’t even successfully occupy 13 colonies. Now there are 48 of them to contend with. I think you kind of proved my point.
Live in barracks. Eat in the mess hall. Wear issued clothing. If you want to call that “payment”, knock yourself out. The proposal obviously refers to what the military and everyone else call “pay.”
I’m not sure anyone who is even one quarter same believes the US will be invaded anytime soon, whether the military is big or small. However, the odds of the Baltics or Taiwan being invaded if we cut the military budget in half…?
It’s pretty much a strawman argument…no one believes the US is going to be invaded, nor has that been the primary reason for the US to HAVE a military since after 1812.
Flyer, at least, seems to believe that invasion of the USA is a possibility. I’d like to hear why.
It’s more reasonable to suggest that our military dissuades some invasions from occurring (e.g. keeps China from invading Taiwan). How this might be in our best interest is a separate issue. If we didn’t provide this disincentive, either somebody else would, in which case we save money, or else China would invade Taiwan, in which case we suffer a loss of prestige and presumably also lose money.
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Flyer, at least, seems to believe that invasion of the USA is a possibility. I’d like to hear why.
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I don’t think that’s what Flyer was saying, but I’ll let him or her respond.
You think that a major shooting war in a part of the world with a large percentage of the trade routes going through it only warrants a ‘presumably also lose money’ comment? Not only would the US’s trade and economy be majorly impacted but so would everyone else too.
I’d like to see the short list of countries that could provide a similar ‘disincentive’ to what the US does (and we don’t just do it in the straights of Taiwan)…off the top of my head I can’t think of a single country or even group of countries that could step up and fill in if we decided to go with the OPs crazy plan.
Well, obviously not by any non-Russian or non-Chinese nation, but Mongolia has to feel pretty hopeless if Russia or China attack it. Sparsely populated and almost no meaningful military.
Aren’t you all missing the easy solution: transfer as much as possible to the National Guards? Sure, State taxes would need to increase, but that’s no skin off your nose, is it?
Not even necessarily the National Guard. Much could actually be transferred to the Reserves. The Army Reserve is all Title 10 and 100% federally funded, but is manned and equipped at a fraction of the cost to tax payers. That actually wouldn’t be a bad idea. At least half of the military could easily go into a Reserve status with no loss in actual capability. What has 3ID done lately, anyway?
There’s an argument to be made that Japan and probably a few other Asian countries would have their own nukes if it weren’t for ours. Same with Saudi Arabia–they may still go that route, depending on what Iran does.
Proving a negative is always very hard to do. HOWEVER–never underestimate the power of a credible deterrence factor. It’s impossible to tell which of our allies might have been attacked if we had had a much weaker military.
People keep forgetting that invading and occupying are two entirely different things.
Russia has the ability to invade certain parts of Alaska–although probably not militarily-important parts.
I don’t believe that invasion of the US is a significant possibility. I DO believe two things–(1) that only our strong military keeps it from becoming a significant possibility, and (2) that it is extremely dangerous and naive to rely on the goodwill of strangers as a defense against bad things happening.
There is almost certainly some military spending we could do without: pork barrel and interservice rivalry prestige projects; and we could probably find much more cost-efficient ways to do the same things we do now. But in the end analysis, a lot of intelligent people have come to the conclusion that our current level of military spending, and what we spend it on, constitutes the least-lousy option open to us in the world today. If the current defense budget was reduced by 50% something would have to go, and it would be painful. It would mean a drastic diminishment of the US role in the global power balance and the result would almost certainly be a world more threatening than what we have today.
True. If the US-Japan defense treaty were ever scrapped, I think there’s a real possibility Japan would embark on a nuclear-weapons program. Japan is still hated by many in Asia, and has the hostile nations of Russia, China, North Korea and (perhaps even South Korea falls into that category) in its vicinity.