I don’t know how many people we have deployed around the world, but if they all came home, what would we do with them?
Whatever he wanted. He’s the Commander in Chief.
We probably wouldn’t have a place to put them all. Troops require barracks, places to work/train, dining halls, schools, hospitals, and many other buildings. It isn’t like we have a whole mess of buildings just sitting around empty on various military bases waiting for several hundred thousand people to show up next week.
OP,
Do you mean these individuals would be released from the military and become private citizens?
If so, one thing that would happen is that the unemployment rate would sky rocket!
I never thought of that.
A related question: What if all the expats decided to come home?
These days the world is a huge, integrated, complex place. Some things are so improbable that they are almost not worth analyzing. It’s like Buchanan wanting to deport all of the illegal immigrants. The fact is that they are so much a part of the system that the unintended consequences are a big unknown. The food shortages (while crops went unharvested), lack of service labor and increased labor costs would have us begging them to come back.
The worldwide US military presence is an enormous economic factor for us and the hosting nations. Dumping all those soldiers and sailors on the job market would be a nightmare (and I don’t think they are going to take jobs picking crops). Taking them out of the host nations might cripple those countries in ways we can only imagine.
Sorry, I messed up editing. I was in a conversation centered on bringing the troops home, and when I said ‘what would we do with them all’ there was just silence. So I began to wonder. I was at the time thinking only of the impact on the US right now, and hadn’t really considered the impact on other countries.
We have over 700 bases across the world. There would be a lot of people coming home. The financial savings would be enormous.It is not just soldiers either.
When we have graduation at Fort Jackson, prostitutes come in from other states. So the first thing is all of our nation’s hookers would get worn out and we’d have to find new ones somewhere. Maybe outsourcing would be the answer.
Also, expect a baby boom.
How many people are we talking about here? 100,000? 1,000,000? More?
Maybe this should be a Great Debate, but I’ve wondered what would happen if the US decided to enact the strategic/military equivalent of “beggar thy neighbor”, and retreated into neoisolationism, leaving the rest of the world on its own. Abandon South Korea, abandon Taiwan, abandon Israel. Let someone else guarantee oil continues to move through the Strait of Hormuz, let someone else keep China from militarily dominating the Pacific Rim, let the European Union cope with a belligerent Russia. Cut the Defense Department to a fixed budget of $100 billion a year and tell them to do the best they can with that much money.
It’ll never happen because empires (formal or informal) almost never contract gracefully and in the short-to-mid term the power vacuum would make the world a scarier place (particularly as everyone and their uncle scrambles to acquire nukes). But while becoming the world hegemon made sense not only strategically but economically in the early 1950s, it doesn’t anymore. Maybe if the US really was a latter-day Rome that specialized in keeping the Legions stationed around the world and drawing tribute from everyone else, that would be one thing. But the US is going broke paying to keep our economic competitors safe.
Since this is an unlikely scenario, let’s ponder on it in IMHO. Moved.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
If we were to close all our overseas bases, it would make no sense whatsoever to keep our military the size that it is. I would expect that rather than redeploying all those troops to the US, we’d just cut the number of troops we have by a very large percentage. Closing all our foreign bases would mean we’ve fundamentally changed our national security strategy to essentially adopt a policy of not projecting military power anywhere beyond the immediate vicinity of the US. There is no need for 1.4 million troops to defend the 50 states.
FWIW, we have about 80,000 troops in Europe, 30,000 in Japan, and 25,000 in Korea, aside from how many we have in Iraq, Afghanistan, and surrounding countries.