What we support and defend

[Fuchs]

The world is not made safer by having a large standing peacetime Army, but it has enabled our allies to invest in their own economies while we subsidize their collective defense.

That's a popular myth among Americans.


Fact is that the U.S. military is so suboptimal for defence of U.S. allies an, so wasteful and so oversized that only a fraction of your military budget is really relevant to the security of U.S. allies.


Furthermore, implicit assumption that Allies would spend more if the U.S. spent less is in stark contrast with the demonstrated irrationality of military spending dimensioning in the world.
Greece has recently cut its military budget by much. I have no idea what threat disappeared, so I have to assume that the budget was irrationally oversized previously.

Governments appear to design the military budget in order to maximize it up to a certain pain threshold in most situations. Economy tanks? Pain threshold goes down, military spending goes down. no relation whatsoever with threats or allies. And so on.

The only area where the U.S. really substituted for its allies' military power is in regard to former axis great powers' (Germany, Italy, Japan) nuclear weapons. I am strongly assuming that this price was one that the U.S. paid happily and fully in its own interest.



Last but not least: The U.S. Army, three quarters of the U.S. Navy plus the last quarter of its amphibious warfare ships, two thirds of the U.S. Air Force, all U.S.Marines and even 90% of U.S. nukes could disappear today and the security situation of the European allies would not have changed substantially. It's all surplus.

[carl]

Bob Jones:

All of the points you raise are the points that are raised, and should be raised, when there are one of those times when we are winding down a military effort and want to reduce military spending and have to decide how to split up the money. Some of the things you say I would disagree with more or less as with some of the phenomanon (sic) you identify, but the points are all valid starting places for argument.

As far as the Marines go, I know they have done their best to carve out a different place and identity for themselves in the US over the last 100 years. They have done a very good job of it too. But to me I think of it as I imagine a foreigner would think of if. If US Army disappeared tomorrow and the US Navy was then designated the US Army, the foreign observer would say no, that's not an army, that's a navy. If you did the same thing with the Army and the Marines, that foreign observer may not even notice. I think that is accurate now. Whether to change all that and what big Army does is one of those things that needs to be worked out.

I agree with the people who say serious consideration should be given to doing something different than what is sometimes done, just cutting everybody equally to equalize the squalling and wait till the budgets get bigger again. We should actually think about re-organizing radically and see what kind of cuts might come from that.

The thing i would really like to see change that may have nothing to do with budget allocations is to effect a change in the command culture of the American military. From my viewpoint it doesn't seem to be a very good one. Maybe hard times caused by budget woes could be used as a tool to do that.

One more thing, we have gone over some of the advantages of having a big standing Army. But there is something that is lost that may have to do with the Army being big. I think it is the ability to adapt to circumstances, to adapt. When the Army was little it was able to adapt to wholly different types of fighting so that they were able to do good enough. Frontier fighting in the 1850s, big big war in the 1860s, frontier fighting again till the 1890s, then conquering islands and subduing insurrections, then big big big overseas industrial war, then back to overseas insurrections, then WWII, all these were fought by guys who made the transition from the one to the other to the other. Maybe our inability to adapt as well as we did in the past doesn't have to do with military being huge, but maybe it does.