I’ve got to disagree. A forward posture is necessary for our security.
Even more, you and I both know that the money spent on defense will not be cut from the budget.
It will then be redirected to entitlements.
And then when a war comes along we’ll have no military budget, an entitlement budget swollen by the former defense budget, and a necessity to recreate a defense budget purely on newly borrowed money. That will make the current debt look like a mole hill.
“A forward posture is necessary for our security.”
If it is ‘necessary’ then that means if we don’t do it then we are all doomed. It also means we must force others to take on our military as a necessity to our defense.
I don’t believe for a second that being forward located is a necessity. It is not even great to have.
We placed our forces in Europe and Asia to provide us a quick strike nuclear capability. The F-111s at Lakenheath to the B-52s in Thailand, but we have missiles that can deliver nukes faster and with less risk and cost. The Cold War generals used scare tactics to get any and every nuclear weapon and delivery vehicle they could, with incredible overlap in capabilities. But, we paid for it all. Gotta have the aircraft even though we finally built the missiles that were supposed to replace the aircraft, even though the Navy also built the subs, but, hey, we’ve always had the aircraft so we can’t do without them now. No way, can’t cut the military budget, we might get attacked!
Any ground forces overseas were too few to stop an attack. Hell, every grunt in Germany knew they would be sacrificed only to delay a Soviet ground advance by a few hours or days at best.
Who exactly are these forward bases supposed to be attacking anyway? What enemy is such a threat as to necessitate us maintaining overseas bases? We’ve been in South Korea for 60+ years. Why can’t the South Koreans have built their forces already? 60 years and we are still there. The book 1984, “We’ve always been at war with North Korea.”
We don’t need to waste our money, our labor, our lives on a military past one that can defeat any attacker to our shores.