Combat Power, Conflict Resolution, and US Economy

[AmericanPride]

The only real military #1 status challenge is the PRC (and so far only regionally). This challenge is founded on industrial capabilities; the production during the last years prior to war can easily be much more important than legacy equipment. Think of China as an equivalent of the '1933' Soviet Union. Ships, aircraft, tanks and even guns produced during the 1920's were largely irrelevant by '41.

I appreciate your analysis and I would argue that long-term security trends are currently in favor of PRC, not the US. While I am interested in your proposed metrics, I don't think there is much in the way of disagreement about current conditions. My primary interest is investigating if structural problems in the US economy is having a detrimental impact on US military power. I think the data so far illustrates that military power is declining; first, in a reduction of military capacity, and second, in a reduction of purchasing power of military capacity. My question is if this trend is at all related to the downward structural trends in the US economy?

"The simultaneous diffusion of threats horizontally and the proliferation of threat capabilities vertically" seems almost intentionally vague.

What about simply describing and assessing the specific perceived threats... who exactly are we afraid of, and what exactly are we afraid they will do? Would any such process support a claim that we live in a period of "unprecedented danger"?

Do we need to look at the military power we have relative to what we had at any time in the past, or at what we have relative to what we need to deal with today's perceived threats and the threats that are expected to emerge? Maybe we no longer have the power to stop Soviet tanks from rolling through the Fulda Gap, but is that a power we still need?

As I stated before, I am first looking at the economy and military capacity. Conflict resolution will be later. In the meantime, I recommend reading the Congressional testimony of DNI Clapper that I cited earlier if you are interested in a review of current and emerging threats. So far, the data suggests that independent of which threats exist, US military capacity now is less than in 1973, and the purchasing power for military capacity is also reduced. Again, this is the real security problem.

A far more apt comparison would of the the F-16IN recently offered to India (but beat out thus far by the Dassault Rafale). That variant of the F-16 is perhaps the most capable and it still won't quite match the F-35 in many respects. Flyaway costs run about $111M for the F-16IN versus $197M for the F35A. That's a factor of only 1:1.7 -- call it two times more cost and then ask the question on combat capability...

The US does not operate the F-16IN so it is not useful in measuring US combat power. But I would like to note that this is an excellent example of inflating prices far along in the platform's history. William Hartung's book provides an excellent overview of Lockheed Martin's practices in this regard; and I think it's a fair representation of the acquisition process as a whole.