How does it tempt government into military aggression? Do you happen to have something besides your personal appraisal of the issue, say academic studies, to support that assertion?
Yes, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle. Better still to have 6 carrier groups and not need 'em.
We don’t have the money, full stop.
Maintaining one carrier group in the Arctic means having at least two or three. The cost of maintaining such a force - even smaller carriers, like the British type - would bust the national defense budget.
If the Russians invade over the water, precisely what will they be invading that needs to be headed off at the coast? It’s geographically equivalent to attacking New York City by invading Mexico, except with worse weather; they’d have to slog through thousands of kilometres of tundra and boreal forest to get to anything.
As… umm, inflexible as Der Trihs can be, there actually is some merit to the theory that in terms of military strength, those who have many hammers think everything looks like a nail. The notion that military strength brings peace through deterrence is just not borne out by the evidence; exactly the opposite seems to be the case. Countries that arm themselves seem to get into a lot of wars.
Yes. We have a military force primarily built for attacking other nations, and as long as we do there will be the constant temptation to use it for just that.
You would almost certainly be wrong —I mean, even military men can do basic arithmetic. But of course, the point isn’t just who wins, it’s also how much damage they take winning. That point applies to this entire thread, but to the Koreas especially.
More reason, not that any was needed, for the urgent need to divide the US military into a defense force and an offence force, which can undertake wars of aggression. Proper accounting is the first step of responsible government.
Really, now? Care to back up that assertion? Oh, nice–and inane–swipe at the intelligence of military personnel.
Der Trihs, so your answer is no, you don’t have anything. Thanks for clearing that up.
I note that you carefully avoid actually arguing against my point.
I note that you don’t back your point up.
Considering that it’s blindingly obvious what else could I do or say? We have a huge and powerful military; we attack people on a regular basis with it. If we didn’t have such a large and powerful military we wouldn’t go around attacking so many people because we wouldn’t have the capability. This is obvious.
You’re just in denial.
How would that even be possible, particularly since the forces needed on defense (i.e. to counter aggression) would be much like the forces needed for aggression - tanks, fighter craft, bombers, warships, transport ships, troops, troop carriers, etc.? Even aircraft carriers can be used in defensively, as would likely be the case if the PRC or NK attacked South Korea, Taiwan, or the Japanese home islands.
Much like you have separate branches of the military at the moment. There you would have a defense force budget which funded branches of the military restricted to defensive conduct. People could sign up in full faith and credit to defend their country, with no likelihood of deployment to wars of aggression. An individual’s oath and code of laws would require the soldier to disobey an order to engage in conduct outside that.
By contrast, congress would meet periodically to openly discuss the projected budget for US wars of aggression. An offense force would not be excluded from defensive duties as well and that would realize economies. Similarly, signing up to an offense force would transparently bind the individual to a future plainly of their choice.
Of course rigor in accounting is not politically neutral. Congress could no longer fund aggression under the heading ‘defense’. Moreover, which members could advocate for increase in the offense force budget? Correspondingly, the actual defensive requirements of the US are minute in comparison to current expenditure. So given proper accounting practice, defense spending would diminish as well. Everybody wins.
In summary; an aggregate of the properly accounted defense & offense expenditure would sharply undercut current costs.
And of course, all of those things cost alot of money. Especially the supply train and the training. Good body armor probably isn’t cheap either.
What does that sentence mean?
Perhaps you could name a few wars engaged in by democratic countries which were acknowledged by the government at that time to be wars of aggression.
What I’m saying is, I think the overwhelming tendency is for a government to label every facet of their military policy as defensive only, even if sober analysis may find otherwise. Just because some people think they have the insight to divine whether artillery battalion is an offensive or defensive asset, doesn’t mean that the government will ever share that view.
Ultimately, word games on policy – whether it’s offensive vs defensive military forces, pro-choice or pro-life, etc. – are bullshit. The policy matters, and policy isn’t dictated by nomenclature.
He wants to bring back the national guard? At least you’d get rid of the strange practice of calling some professional soldiers national guards…
I wonder what would happen if China and the DPRK colluded to strike at our allies simultaneously, like say, the DPRK launches an attack against South Korea while at the same time China invades Taiwan. What then? WHat if while that happened we were still involved in Afghanistan. And then also Iran attacked Israel? What about the Russians? Does anyone truly believe that they are really our true ally? What if amidst all this they decide to cut off all their natural gas to all the parts of Europe that depend on it in the middle of winter?
The USA for good or ill has a huge military. We have misused it in the past, but under a scenario such as I described, it can (and would) be used for good again defending our allies, ourselves, our interests and honoring our treaties. So while the misuse of the military is deeply regrettable, I’d rather have it than not.
Wikipedia’s pages on the two. The standing army of North Korea is 1.1mil personnel, as opposed to 680,000 personnel in the ROK’s military. Their respective budgets, however, are a very different story: $6bil versus $27bil. Also, you can subtract the personnel and expense of North Korea’s artillery forces —they’re for destroying Seoul, not actual military targets, and aren’t necessarily even mobile. Add onto that the likely air superiority that the South Koreans would enjoy, the malnutrition of even soldiers in the DPRK, and… well, you get the picture.
The “military men” was sarcasm —my point was not that people in the US or Korean armed forces are stupid (they aren’t), it was that to think they wouldn’t know the balance of military power between the DPRK and ROK assumes them to be completely brainless.
But that only begs the question of why keep getting ourselves into said alliances and treaties in the first place. There’s no denying that the US currently has our finger in every pie on the planet and that we can’t unilaterally cancel it all and go home tomorrow; I think the OP is rather asking why we can’t move toward a future in which more of these things are not our problem. e.g. Russia cutting off gas to Europe can be something Europe deals with.
Worth noting, in this equation, that Korea isn’t a very big piece of geography to do all this fighting in. I looked it up in an atlas, and the distance between my base and the DMZ is less than what I used to routinely drive each way once a month to hang out with my parents and get my laundry done in college. Took me less than 4 hours to travel that far, and my base isn’t even strictly considered a “Forward base” as far as the Korean theater is concerned. From where I am, it’s about the same distance south until you run out of Korea and find yourself in the Pacific.
That said, for the North Koreans, this would probably be the most hellish road trip of their exceedingly short lives, due in no small part to the very large sums of money and manpower the Republic of Korea and the US put into maintaining a deterrence in the region. But there just isn’t much margin for error in a modern, mobile war.
I understand your point but what do we do, leave NATO? Go into complete isolationist status, abandon Israel, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and everywhere else where there’s a mutual interest in our presence being there? It would allow for too much hegemony on the part of regimes that are far worse than ours. It would make the world a worse place, not a better one.
It might be better in the short term for the USA, but not for the world at large.