Why do we keep US troops all over the world? Would we not benefit ourselves by simply emptying Germany and England and everywhere else of US troops?
Do we really need 12 aircraft carrier battlegroups?
What will it take to reign in the military establishment?
This is better suited to GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
If we want to have the strongest military in the world and play empire, yes.
Probably a general collapse of the country due to the sheer expense of it all. Our collective ego won’t let us admit that playing empire like we do is stupid and self destructive. Rather like what happened to Britain, who held onto their empire long after it made any sense.
Not commenting the other stuff, but having naval supremacy makes a lot of sense considering that you’re essentially isolated on your own continent (along with friendly Canada and disorganized Mexico). Anyone who wants to project power in North America would need to cross a substantial amount of sea and you need to do the same in the opposite scenario.
Further, a fleet isn’t really something that can be whipped up quickly at need. Building it is prohibitively expensive and you require a lot of specialized crew, training and equipment to make it work. If the US basically sank it today, it would take decades if not centuries of not needing them to recoup the potential rebuilding costs, even with the high maintenance price.
I’m not suggesting that we scrap the Navy, but have you seen the ‘per hour’ cost of a carrier, much less a battle group? I understand projecting power, but damn, look at the National debt.
Even if we disregard the carriers, what about troops in Germany, England, etc? Do we really need to have our troops spending Government dollars in pretty danged peaceful countries?
Germany is more of a staging area for the Mid East today than anything else.
We could have half the carrier groups and still have naval supremacy though. There’s a lot of room between “having no navy” and the status-quo.
By the same token, though, no ones going to show up on the world scene one day and take us unawares with their thirty-five carrier groups in a trans-atlantic invasion. The time and money and personnel it takes to build up a modern navy means we don’t need to keep ten times the next nearest nations naval strength to stay ahead just in case they try and build up there own strength. If we keep our navy down to say, double or triple the combined strenghth of say, Russia and China, then I suspect we could respond to any increases in their naval spending by building up our own strengh in plenty of time to make sure we stay ahead.
We answered that pretty well in this thread. Perhaps the best answer was given by emacknight:
I’m sure you’ve heard about the ‘bridge to nowhere’. The U. S. Military is the military to nowhere, that has hundreds of bases to nowhere, fights wars to nowhere, and spends hundreds of billions per year on planes to nowhere, ships to nowhere, and so forth.
Our last few wars have been against countries with no airforce or navies to speak of. How well did they go? We have owned the skies. We could bomb freely all day and night, yet people persist. With modern rocketry ,it may be a navy is obsolete. Perhaps subs may be useful. As long as we are careful to fight backward enemies, a navy will survive. But it may be a thing of the past.
It’s just the USAF left in the UK, there’s only Mildenhall and Lakenheath remaining as full bases, basically staging areas. There’s a handful of munitions stores and a few secret squirrel installations. As far as I can tell there’s no USN facilities left, and no Army, although I’m sure there will be some staff presence at various Nato facilities, and at the Trident missile store at Coulport.
Also, it has been “proven” by real world experience to naval planners that you are only going to have 1/3 of your fleet on station at any one time.
1/3 on station, 1/3 in transit, 1/3 repair/refit/training. (The German Uboat deployments bear this out, for example.)
So, for 12 carrier groups, typically only 4 will be at or near the scene of a crisis at any one moment.
In Gulf War 1, the US had 6 CVBG at start: Midway, Kennedy, Ranger, America, Roosevelt, Saratoga, out of 14 in the inventory.
Right, the US spends as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, which only makes sense if we’re planning on fighting the entire rest of the world at once. At the very least, we should deduct, say, Canada, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel from the rest of the world, and then cut our spending down to match everyone else. That’d let us match, dollar for dollar, every place that hates us, and every place that we think might hate us any time in the immediate future, and even every place we’re not entirely sure about, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Plus, as long as all of the places that we’re not entirely sure about don’t all go picking a fight at the same time, we can shuffle forces around from the cooler spots to bring overwhelming force to bear on the ones that are picking a fight at the moment. And then too, I would certainly hope that our technology (which is superior to that of most of the places we’re not friends with) would let us get a lot more military effectiveness per cost than most other places.
That would let us match all the people we might end up fighting in a defensive war. While the fact that we’re a million miles from anywhere important may be a defensive benefit, it’s also a huge offensive drain.
Where is the next American war going to be? Probably in the Middle East again. You *need *drastically superior forces to fight a war halfway across the world.
Well, where I live is a “pretty danged peaceful country.” If it weren’t for the US military stationed here at the request of the host country, it would be a “pretty danged peaceful country” overrun by the country to the north.
Perhaps the OP needs to bone up on the concept of treaty obligations.
It’s actually worse than a “simple” bridge to nowhere, because once you’ve built that bridge, well, you’re going to spend money to maintain it and that’s about it. A military superpower to nowhere actually gives people an itch to use it against someone. Anyone. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a big dick military ?
I’d much rather the US gov would just cut Middle America a check. Don’t build bombs, or planes, or bullets, just get a thousand free bucks a month and shut up. Watch TV, build muscle cars, paint your own backyard Sistine Chapel, I don’t give a rat’s. But each bomb or drone of E/F-18 that thousand bucks check buys right now is one more incentive to fuck shit up somewhere, for no other reason than “we can, and they can’t do a thing about it”. And that sort of drives the rest of the world antsy, somehow.
America must have full spectrum dominance over every inch of the Earth forever and ever, amen. Oh, and don’t forget this includes outer space.
The real problem is that the military has been an integral part of the U.S. economy ever since the start of WWII and getting rid of it could be disastrous since it’s not exactly clear what would be left considering how much of the rest is fake (e.g. the financialization of the economy, all the propped up bubbles).
A lot of technology we enjoy today is a direct result of the MIC. The problem is, as Madeleine Albright pointed out, what’s the point of having this great military if you’re not gonna use it?
If you’re referring to Korea, no I don’t think the OP would go along with the idea that that bitterly divided peninsula is “pretty danged peaceful”, and would thus make an exception.
The situation in Korea is not quite analogous to the situation in Germany/the UK/Japan, though, is it?
it’s not bloated because it is too big. It is bloated because it is too inefficient. Too little bang for the buck, but more than enough lawyers, excessive prices for supplies, exorbitant health care costs, social engineering, minority empowerment, doomed R&D projects like anti-missile defense and other such junk.
To take the simplest possible example, if we spend $100K per year per soldier (including American-style salary and American-style health insurance cost) and China spend $5K (all number hypothetical) that does not ipso facto mean that that single American soldier is worth 20 Chinese ones on the battlefield. So China can have just as many or more soldiers but be very boastful of their relatively small military budget.
Social engineering? Minority empowerment? WTF are you talking about here?