US defense: out of control? Can we change it? Why liberal/conservative?

[Age_Quod_Agis]

@BrainGlutton

An army is an organization that specializes in killing people and breaking things. It fights. Or it simply exists as a standing threat to discourage enemies. It is as fundamentally unsuited to nation-building as it is to policing.

I agree that this is a fundamental problem. I’m just not sure what the solution is.

[Age_Quod_Agis]

Ugh. I see now the context of what you were talking about. :smack:

I think you’re absolutely right, BrainGlutton. I apologize for missing the point.

[jjimm]

@UncleBeer

You guys might wanna look at this from another direction before slashing all that defense spending. A well-equipped (and large) military could be considered a by-product of keeping all those engineers employed and factories staffed. If you try to eliminate too much defense spending, you’re gonna have a lot of unhappy unemployed people. At best, you may just end up moving the spending around a bit.

You do realise this sounds like a socialist defending a nationalized industry!

[UncleBeer]

Yeah, I know what it sounds like. That’s why I added that final sentence to my post.

[Ludovic]

Well, some have proposed a new branch of the military dedicated to humanitarian causes. One whose primary mission is peacekeeping and/or heavy rebuilding efforts. Then, you wouldn’t have the institutional conflicts between dedication to slaughter and philanthropy, but you’d still have the discipline and resources (and much of the firepower) you need to get the jobs done.

[furt]

@BrainGlutton

An army is an organization that specializes in killing people and breaking things. It fights. Or it simply exists as a standing threat to discourage enemies. It is as fundamentally unsuited to nation-building as it is to policing.

Specializes in != is only capable of. As has already ben mentioned, the US military was largely responsible for rebuilding Japan and (in concert with allies) Germany after WWII, and the military routinely engages in humanitarian efforts (e.g. Tsunami relief). UN troops are used all over the world (granted, with mixed success) as peacekeepers. It is true that making war is their primary task, and I agree that there is a tendency at times to ask them to step too far outside their training, but it does not follow that warmaking is all they can do.

For one thing, it’s a waste of resources to keep very expensive equipment and highly trained logistics people on the shelf doing nothing 98% of the time.
More essentially the job of a military is defense. Because the US is so wildly preeminent, we’re reaching the stage where smart enemies are realizing the US simply cannot be opposed in pitched combat, and are looking to attack in other ways; the military needs to adjust to that.

If the issue is excessive expenditure, it seems far more efficient to – so far as it is possible – reconfigure and change the military so that it is able to deal with the actual needs of the 21st century instead of creating a seperate monumental bureacracy with massive duplication of skills.