Eh, hegemony has is benefits, peace and stability through one dominant military force raises all boats but ours a little higher. Do you know what the price of gasoline is in Europe? Is I worth it in total? I dunno, I just want that to be the debate and not station men overseas for my “freedom”.
Do you like seeing America’s military weakened and so emasculated? I don’t.
If you mean the archaic definition of emasculated I think we’d get our balls chopped off less if we stopped resting them on other nations doorsteps.
Strength costs money and lives. For what end is it being applied is my greatest concern. Not maintaining a certain yearly expenditure of money and lives.
Are you sure this country would still have a strong defense even if you cut it? Right now, the U.S. military is becoming a little bit weak.
I, like most Americans, like being safe and secure. Our military should be large enough to keep me, and other Americans, safe and secure. The thing is, though, that really doesn’t take much of a military at all. We take up a large chunk of a continent, all by ourselves. Most of the rest of that continent is taken up by a nation with whom we’re about as friendly as it’s possible for two nations to get. Our other neighbor doesn’t want to do anything worse to us than to pick our lettuce for cheap, and even if they wanted to, they couldn’t do much more than that. Everyone else on our continent is even weaker, and we get along pretty well with most of them, too.
Just what part of our defense are those 19 aircraft carriers contributing? OK, yeah, if someone overseas did manage to strike at us somehow, we’d want to be able to strike back… which we could do from land-based airfields in any of the many other countries scattered around the globe which are also quite friendly to us. OK, maybe the next Hitler or Stalin starts taking over our allies’ airfields, and we need to fight to defend them, and need a mobile airbase from which to do it: That justifies perhaps as many as four carriers, one each in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, plus another to rotate out to relieve, repair, and re-supply those three. Now what are the other 15 for?
Similar analyses apply to most of the rest of our military. We’re trying to prepare to take on the entire rest of the globe all at once, and not only is that horrendously expensive, but we couldn’t even succeed at that.
Have you met a person that didn’t think they deserved a raise? Have you known a government institution to ever say they couldn’t use increased funding? Or wouldn’t give dire prognostications for cuts?
Don’t worry. Every state in the Union has Defense contacts worth billions, no one (D or R) is going to cut their States projects and kill jobs and lose votes.
I think this is an important point.
The way some people see it, either you’re at war with a country or you are not, and a war between any of the big powers is extremely unlikely, therefore we don’t need that kind of capability.
But there is something of a chess game going on, where the US’ ability to project force worldwide affecting how much Russia, China and others will risk bullying their neighbours.
A United States that decides to just protect its borders and do some limited counter-terrorism operations, removes that threat and likely makes a number of regions of the world more volatile.
So you’re an isolationist? Nothing that happens 3 miles off of our border concerns you?
I think we’ve contributed (not made, contributed) to the mess in the Middle East. But the President has determined that we won’t take an active leadership or military role there now. Are your happy that the U.S. has ceded any leadership role to Putin there? and do you think that if there was strong U. S. leadership there, that Turkey would have shot down the Russian fighter? Does that action make you feel more or less secure?
Well here we have agreement! We actually have only 10 aircraft carriers, not 19. (I understand how you got to 19 but that’s wrong.) And ships require a ton of maintenance, either your brother’s in Florida, or nuclear powered aircraft carriers so the U.S. can’t in any way deploy all ten.
So you think we should have four carriers deployed at once? We only can deploy 2 or 3 (normally) now so we can agree that we are short. So we can count on your support for another three so we can deploy one more?
Bottom line is that the U. S. military is getting smaller while that of Russia and China is getting larger. If you think that’s a good thing, than that’s great. Perhaps the world will be safer with those two nations taking the lead in world affairs. If you don’t think that’s good, than you should be concerned I’d think.
Because all those guys have to do is wait for American to get sick of dropping billion dollar hardware on them from halfway around the world.
When was the last time the US demonstrated the ability to effectively fight ONE regional conflict?
Sounds like more of the right-wing Republican fantasy that all it takes is for America to toss it’s weight around and the whole wide world will fall in line. Sorry, but complex problems can’t be solved by big loud dumb people making dumb decisions.
What “leadership” do you imagine Putin has demonstrated in Syria? He’s dropped a lot of bombs (as have we) and made a lot of tough talk. And for his trouble, he’s got an airliner destroyed by terrorists and is on the verge of war with Turkey (and by the way what ever happened with the Ukraine?) .
The stat the OP was looking for was the US spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined. Including Russia and China. The rest of them are our allies!
When you start using terms like “emasculated” it makes it pretty clear that your concerns are not actually related to national security, which is what our military is for.
Right. What matters is not how effective our military is, what matters is how we FEEL about it. And we can’t FEEL our military is forever increasing in glory and honor unless we spend ever increasing amounts of money on it. The purpose of the military is parades, and flags, and salutes, and medals, and young men feeling proud, and old men remembering how they were proud.
He suggests we embark on a multi-trillion dollar spending spree to increase America’s self-esteem and give everyone in the America a participation trophy.
It’s rare that the Pentagon sends memo’s that say “no thanks! We have enough budget!”
I am not convinced that in this day and age the biggest threats to our national security will be prevented by more carrier battle groups and heavy armored brigades.