And you must be joking if you think the US fulfilling its treaty to defend Taiwan would only require 'a few submarines, and maybe a carrier group.' Did you read my article on the Sunburn missiles and what they were developed for? And do not think about a stealth strike either due to the upgrade chech radars.
It is called assymetrical warfare, and at present the US is not prepared for it.
Actually congress has asserted this fact in the past, and although i agree with you some of this may be a political ploy to get funding for weapons programs, it still remians a reality. The US can not EFFECTIVELY meet its objectives of facing 2 foes at different global regions. That is a fact. And although i love the US military and am in awe of it, i do not blind myself to the fact serious work needs to be done to correct nearly a decade of atrophy.
Listen, I'll put this in quick simple terms.
We still have a military designed for a war with the USSR. We got more crap stockpiled throughout the world they don't even know how much they have. We have more tanks, missles, support vehicles and munitions then anyone can count. it's packed in grease all over the world. That's as far as I want to say about what we have but you get the idea. I know because I seen alot of it and used to scratch my head thinking why do we need so much. This stuff doesn't get thrown away -- never ! They make it and ship it somewhere then it's packed in grease until it's needed. It comes out brand new when the time comes. We ungreased alot of this during the first Iraq war and packed it up in grease again right afterwords.
Can we fight two wars at the same time?
I would say that in 99% of anything we could think up we can with what we currently have. It's not even a matter of arms, bombs, aircraft, logistics etc.. We have all this and we can use commericial aircraft and ships if we needed (It's US law) but there is one thing that we don't know for sure if it will work out in the second front and this is the people. The active duty can take care of war one but war two would require alot of reserves. Are they up to the task? I would bet they would be because in WWI and WWII we had a bunch of farm boys with 26 weeks of training being sent to the front and they did OK so our reserves would be rusty at first but they'd kick ass in the end - it's the American way !
Now if your question is can we take 10,000 dead American G.I.'s without another attack on the US my answer would be I don't think we can?
What are you basing this on? Rumsfield just said on friday that we could fight two wars at the same time. Is he lying?
I think we're seeing the lobbyists for more defense spending putting this stuff out !
I agree Clinton did cut the military more then he should have. He and the GOP Congress are to blame for this. The GOP went hog wild cutting the military the last 10 years and they are now jumping on Bush's back for the ride to build it back up. Look up the facts and you'll be pissed at what they tried to cut.
The biggest problem right now with the military isn't the numbers as we hear in the news but the quality of what we have.
We have a severe shortage of spare parts for most of our aircraft because it costs money to keep a part on a shelf. The C-5 fleet has 50% of them in maintenance because they're waiting for parts. The big problem I see is a long drawn out war just like the homeland defense deal we just went through but draining the logistic arm of our military.
They're replacing C-5's with C-17's that carry 50% of the load. Well, what happens to the other 50% of the airlift requirements? 10 years down the road we will have a problem because there will be no C-141's at all and only 10% of the C-5's will be flyable and congress hasn't funded more C-17's to replace all these while they want to fund a 200 billion dollar lease program for a replacement for the KC-135's that can go another 30 years. Our fighters are 30 years old and there isn't any 1 for 1 replacement deal on the books so what happens to them in 10 years when 80% are grounded for parts?
Talk about scratching you head?