Donald Trump listened to a national security briefing last week and asked a senior expert three times that since we have nuclear weapons why can't we use them? Let's say for a moment that Trump isn't completely off of his rocker. Maybe he was postulating that if we devote so much expense to maintain a stockpile that we are not going to use, then why waste the money? Or, maybe he was asking, with all of the warring actions in which we are engaged, isn't there someplace where we can't just drop a nuke and end it?
Well, ok, that's crazy talk.
More to the point of need is to address the question, how much military defense cost is essential to secure Americans from foreign attack with 100% certainty?
Some experts at the American Enterprise Institute are addressing the subject. AEI is a conservative military-defense lobby organization.
Mackenzie Eaglen wrote an article for AEI that was placed in the American Legion Magazine, published July 29, 2016.
"Our incredible shrinking military
Defense, Foreign and Defense Policy
Too often in Washington, the focus of partisan fights is a dollar sign, particularly when it comes to defense. Depending on who’s talking, the military budget is too high or too low (though a consensus is forming around “too low,” one that includes the Joint Chiefs, President Obama and most members of Congress).
Instead of focusing exclusively on the size of the defense budget, policymakers should instead examine what these dollars buy in terms of safety, security, and stability. In other words: look at the complex outputs rather than simple dollar inputs.
The United States of America is officially a one-war power, a husk of its traditional status as a two-war superpower.
These days, defense dollars are buying less and, in a first, getting less.
Few realize this reality outside the Pentagon. Policymakers argue about defense vs. non-defense spending, the use of base vs. war spending, or which party is to blame for the Budget Control Act – a policy Frankenstein everyone seems to hate, but no one is capable of rescinding permanently.
As a result, the nation’s armed forces face two distinct challenges that will worsen as budgets level off and the military atrophies: first, a force-planning construct that is woefully inadequate for the global and everyday demands of wartime and peacetime; and second, a board of directors (the Pentagon, White House and Congress) that cannot clarify priorities, make difficult trade-offs, redefine service roles and missions, or take any assignment off the table – even as the military’s capability, capacity and readiness decline in tandem."
http://www.aei.org/publication/our-incredible-shrinking-military/?utm_source=paramount&utm_medium=email&utm_content=AEITHISWEEK&utm_campaign=Weekly080616
The main idea is that the notion of having the capacity to fight two major wars concurrently is now not in the budget. Having less capacity means reining in foreign policy such that the American military is not committing boots on the ground. Our approach is to provide advanced technology support to allies instead.
As such, advanced technology is a force multiplier as we see in combat against terrorists in the Middle East. State-of-the-art technology such as air power cannot be used to finish the job on the ground. In fact, that job should be done by local forces.
Therefore, the U.S. military role is one of training and sometimes requires special forces engagement to direct air power and to advise allied forces.
Concluding from this snippet of analysis is that Americans must rely more on advanced technology and less on army ground forces for national protection. Technology is a force multiplier and you cannot use old body-count metrics to compare the strength of military power.
As for the nukes, not discussed here, maintaining the stockpile is an enormous waste of resources, and that expense needs to shrink to offset the need for resources that are better applied elsewhere.
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It is guns or butter. We have enough military and must curb our appetite for war. Needed is more economic growth and addressable upward mobile opportunity.
ReplyDeleteI agree 100% at some point we need to stop trying to build an empire and focus on us... spend the money in ways that will improve the lives of millions here at home. Rebuilding our infrastructure is one place to start. This would create jobs from the top all the way down to bottom. Good paying jobs. Then people would have money to buy products which we could produce here thus creating more jobs. Trickle up I call it.
ReplyDeleteExcellent point and good alternative investment.
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