Posted on 03/06/2009 2:59:24 AM PST by linbiao123
FYI: I have no first hand experience with a real world military or weapons development.
Why does the US have such a large conventional military? A military half the current size would be able to defeat any other country, bomb Iran into the stone age (albeit take twice as long to do so), or fight al qaeda in Afghanistan. Moreover, 'fighting' terrorists is something best done with special forces and spies, with the conventional military providing death from above on demand.
With the exception of a future China, no other nation will have the ability to economically outdo the United States.
Why does the US military insist on having weapon systems designed specifically for itself instead of purchasing 'off the shelf'? What is wrong with letting another country make a proven weapon system and then buying a manufacturing license like Iraq, Iran, India and other countries do with Russia while we stick to designing superiority weapons like the F22 and the next generation attack submarine? The US is designing a future destroyer. So is Britain. Why not buy destroyers from Britain?
We have (had?) an industrial base and can always build more arms and armor if the need arises.
If the concern is protecting American lives from external (terrorist) threats, a new wall on the 2000 mile US-Mexico border would cost ~8 billion (http://www.weneedafence.com/). With 1 watchperson per mile at 40 hour shift (4 shifts for 24/7 surveillance), and $75,000 per person per year (including overhead), nets $600 million in annual salary. If one wants to be more ambitious, tripling the budget would allow a similar border on the Canadian border. Further, sea borders could be patrolled by small surveillance craft, predator UAVs and coast guard patrol boats. To patrol the US sea borders could run in the low tens of billions/year.
Note: I do not think the smaller military would be able to hold all of Iraq. We might have invaded, and then left at least part of the country, or bombed Iraq back to the stone age to halt Saddam's inexorable drive to get nuclear weapons if we had a smaller military.
What does Switzerland have to do with this?
"I have no experience with a real world."
The question is somewhat ambiguous but I will attempt to help with what I suspect is the thought behind it.
Since WW2 the United States has felt that the military should be able to force project anywhere, anytime, in any conditions. While this is an admirable goal, it is expensive and requires a large force. The second issue is that we have since WW2 felt we would have to fight at least two simultaneous regional conflicts. This does not necessarily mean Iraq and Afghanistan. It really means something like the Middle East and sub Asia or Europe and the pacific. To make this work the military has specific units trained for contingencies in certain land mass types. I’m thinking of units like the 10th Mountain in Ft Drum or the Air Force units stationed in Alaska. This increases the size of the military.
Additionally, thinking about the Navy, if you want a carrier, you really want a carrier, but the carrier has to be protected by a given amount of support units. And how about the logistics trail to get beans, bullets, and bacon to the fighting man at the front. All this is expensive and increases the size and composition of the military. Let me cite one big change since WW2 that reflects this thinking - In WW2 the army had railroad units, truck units, and large stevedore units to move men and equipment from the point of embarkation to the front. In Iraq currently, quite a bit of the trucking is done by civilian contractors (at a cost) to keep the size of the military down. However on this specifically it has had the interesting side effect of requiring more military “protection” than the old army trucking units which provided their own. I’m not saying this is good or bad but pointing out how even small changes have ripple effects on military manpower.
If we as the American people though our elected officials (as inept as most are) decide that the requirements for the military can be scaled back – there can be a reduction in the size. But the military in war is not something you want to ask to do more with less. You want to show up with overwhelming firepower and kill everything in site.
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. It comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday. - John Wayne
hello and welcome to free republic!
Are you new to the obama adminstration?
being in charge of defense spending must be an awesome job.
haven’t your texbooks arrived yet from Harvard?
good luck with defending the free world, and all that
Anyone with recent military experience would agree with you. Some guys are on a fourth or fifth one-year tour of the middle east. It's very tough on both men and equipment. It's also extremely tough on the family members - many of whom have young children that don't even remember what their dad or mom looks like.
I remember when Carter was President. I was assigned to a mobile radar unit and we were gone more than we were in garrison. One year we went to Denmark and spent three months during the winter - came back to garrison for two weeks and then went to Saudi for six months during the summer.
Our equipment was completely worn out - but we couldn't take it out of service for maintenance because we couldn't function without it. We were behind on all our admin work - like writing personnel appraisals and rewriting procedures, regulations, and checklists so when we were in garrison we spent 18 hour days trying to fix equipment, resupply parts, and catch up on admin chores.
In the 90s the military downsized. I was in a 14-person unit that developed training for the F-15. We were merged with a larger unit and lost our admin support and some of our instructor slots. Two years later we merged with another unit and lost even more slots. After the dust settled we had six people with more taskings than we had as a 14 person unit. We worked nights and weekends just to try to keep up.
The pilots we had assigned were happy to be there. Most had come from Eglin or Langley operational units and would spend three months deployed to Saudi and come back for a few weeks and then go to the Balkans for another three months. They continued this type of rotation until the people and the airplanes were worn out.
Anyone who thinks the military is over staffed is ignorant.
I smelled it immediately after reading the title and it being posted as a vanity piece.
Keep an eye on this one if he/she doesn't get banned today.
And the fact that she has her back to the sea, and there are people on three sides of her who would like to finish the job Hitler started.
Never again they say, and they mean it.
To allow you the freedom to post stupid questions and take up bandwidth.
Cause it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad, world.
Can you think of a better way to get quickly and factually educated than to post a direct question on FR?
To pizz people like you off. Why else?
While I agree with the general sentiment of “we want to project force anywhere, anytime,” I think a lot of people are hung up on a fantasy confrontation with Russian and China still. Attacking anything other than a third-world country like Iraq or Afghanistan is either going to be a handful of special-ops guys or a volley of nukes. There’s no way in heck we’re ever going to be fighting a column of russian tanks, or facing down a million chinese with ak-47’s from across the battlefield. We’re going to turn them into a glass parking lot (and they’ll try to do it to us in return).
You raise an interesting point, and one that is open and obvious. For many years, we've spent more on our military than the next several largest nations combined! Americans seem to not mind this very much, I think, because we not only want to make sure that our homes are well-protected from those who want to destroy what we have, but we also want to be able to help others in need, anywhere in the world. We also have obligations to provide most of the military protection for many other nations (Japan, Germany, South Korea, Iraq, etc), and most of those nations ardently oppose any notions of our military leaving (because then their governments would have to spend billions on building a military, rather than spending those billions on their social programs).
Americans are generally happy to allow this, because it increases our security, helps other nations have a better quality of life, and keeps the status quo... which is usually among the top priorities for America, since we've enjoyed the "top spot" in the world for several decades now.
I'll look forward to your replies.
Why are so many Chinese going to school in America?
Doctrine used to be the ability to fight on two major fronts plus a little one. We are not able to handle even that expected task anymore.
Why did you choose a former Mao heir apparent as your screen name?
We never wanted to HOLD Iraq. We wanted to secure it and return it to Iraqi control ASAP. That task is almost complete thanks to the surge (which was YEARS late in coming).
“..smells to me of drive-by troll..”
And maybe from China, too.
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