Promoted for discussion by Brendan
I know, believe me I know...
but if they were I think they could make a withdrawl from Iraq a winning national security issue. Right now our ability to react to any world events in a military manner is severely constrained by having our resources tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are any number of scenarios we can posit where the ability to put boots on the ground could be useful to influencing situations, and just as many situations where not having that ability means we have few options.
Examples- China's looked askance at Taiwan for a long time now.
They claim that Taiwan belongs to them and resent that the island was refuge to many fleeing Mao's take over. US plans for pacific fleets explicitly include an assumption that we may fight a naval war with China at some point over Taiwan. Right now two out of 11 carrier strike groups are in the Middle East (Eisenhower and Enterprise). A third just finished a rotation and has come back to rest and refit.
That leaves 8 for all other eventualities, not all of which are likely to be simultaneously available for action.
But overall the Navy and Airforce have gotten off easy when it comes to Iraq, so let's consider a scenario which would require army and marines. North Korea is not exactly the most stable nation. Kim gives the impression of being bombastic and petty. It is hardly ridiculous to imagine a ground war with South Korea could occur.
North Korea also has the largest percapita military in the world (although their equipment is probably less than spectacular). We do keep troops in South Korea, some 25,000 of them. NoKo's military has over 1 million active members and another 5 million reserves.
South Korea has about 500,000 men under arms. If Kim decided to make a serious run at Seoul we'd need more "boots on the ground" to stop him. Air sorties won't do it. They couldn't in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq, they won't in the mountainous terrain or cities of Korea.
What if Putin completes his journey to the dark side and decides he really really wants to run a new russian empire? On the pretext of a terrorist attack and its former status as part of the USSR he invades Belarus.
It might help if we coincidentally had a bunch of marines conducting joint landing exercises in Poland to keep Putin from getting carried away.
None of which is possible when our military is straining to meet the mission in Iraq. That the surge is unsustainable is admitted by the Pentagon. We will break the army if we try to keep the current levels up. Recruiting has been down for a while now, made up only partially by the loosening of restrictions on enlisting criminals and the insane. At the same time experienced non-com officers are leaving in numbers far higher than usual.
That we've let a completely optional and useless war so compromise our national security is criminal, and the dems should paint McCain, and any republican that wants to continue the war at all cost and for no gain, exactly that way.
__________________________
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Assassin's mace
an interesting article on China's military strategy vs the US. It also touches on alliances between China, Russia, and Iran and the trouble that could cause us:
And the eponymous "mace":
The "squall" torpedoes they mention are supercavitating torpedoes. They move four or five times faster than normal torpedoes due to the low drag of super cavitating (the torpedoe travels in a bubble of vacuum). I'm not an expert on sea warfare but they really do seem like game changers as far as naval power.
Oh... yeah, the squall can carry a nuclear payload.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
One one hand, I don't disagree...
......I don't disagree that Iraq has eroded the military's ability to take on other potential threats. However I have a different and more radical opinion about the necessity of the necessary size of our standing army and the geographic placement of those forces in peacetime. My general opinion is that we can mount effective response to emerging threats while maintaining a much smaller, leaner, less costly standing army than we have now, and that furthermore, the placement of our forces around the globe so that they are near where the likely threats will come is unnecessary and a waste of money in most instances.
My thought is based in my belief that success in any military engagement has much more to do with strong leadership and certainty of purpose in the mission, and not military might based on troop numbers and hardware. In other words, if most people see the military engagement as righteous, and the leaders are competent, the effort will succeed. People make a big deal about training forces, but really, a large army can be created out of a motivated populace in a relatively short period of time, as needed. (Witness the fact that it was even possible to train an unmotivated shiftless no-account brat like George Bush as a fighter pilot while an unpopular war was ongoing.)
Part of the problem we are having in Iraq is not so much the size of our total army in 2003-- we had plenty of troops-- but instead that the American people were not mobilized for the mission, so that even with a large military at the beginning of the mission, we are now facing troop shortfalls in Iraq. My idea would be to automatically trigger a draft for any military mission over a certain size-- anything much larger than the Afghanistan mission, and the draft notices would be in the mail. Our political leadership would be a lot more selective in choosing ambitious missions like Iraq if such a move automatically triggered a draft-- drafts would tend to cause the public to scrutinize our government's justification for war a little more closely than they sometimes have in the past.
One other problem with Iraq was that our troops were "committed" elsewhere around the globe at the start of the war. To me, this is largely a problem of perception-- the perception that removing troops stationed abroad is somehow "abandoning" the region. In Korea, for instance, it is not the presence of any certain number of troops in South Korea that is the deterrent to any dreams of invasion by the North Korean regime; it is, instead, our strong alliance with South Korea and our expressed and implied common interests in the defense of South Korea. If we removed our troops from South Korea tomorrow, would this mean that we had abandoned our commitment to aid our ally against an aggressor? Of course not. But some fools on all sides would perceive it that way, and that's why permanently stationing troops aborad is a particulary sticky trap for any nation. We need to extricate ourselves from that trap by drawing down our troops at these overseas bases.
Huge standing armies and gee-whiz hardware have diminishing returns even in cases where it's advantageous to have a large, fully trained force immediately at hand. This is especially true here in the United States, where our sheer technical military might is mostly wasted because our human rights ethic prevents us from using that technical might to its fullest effect anyway (at least most of the time, post Hiroshima/Nagasaki). Additionally, large standing armies get soft and complacent while waiting for the big war. Expensive equipment corrodes or becomes obsolete-- hundreds of billions of dollars is wasted on military equipment that will never see combat. The best leadership gets diluted in the huge standing army.
So I don't agree with the general frame of your argument. I would much rather that we complete our commitment in Iraq and then reexamine our bloated military and misguided and ineffective defense policies, rather than hastily withdraw from Iraq in the name of having our same old policy of having a huge standing army standing at parade rest around the world at huge and unsustainable cost and with little benefit to our national defense or the defense of our allies and interests around the world.
If you're going to have drafts
to build up forces for what could be an immediate conflict, then I would also think you'd want mandatory training for military age citizens. Perhaps one summer when they turn 21 and then periodic weekends or something.
Just think, everyone would be in better shape too... what a deal!
Another perspective: if Iraq demonstrates the necessity of having boots on the ground to pacify internal resistance (and the relative uselessness of some massively expensive hardware under such circumstances), maybe we should commit to a large standing army and keep it from getting rusty by being more quick to intervene abroad. I realize that's completely contrary to the philosophy you laid out above but I think there's a good case to be made that we could positively influence world events by policing troubled hot spots, to our benefit (squash environments where terrorism grows) and to the benefit of locals trapped in a bad situation. I don't expect much support for that idea but I think it deserves serious consideration.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Not a bad idea...
...The mandatory training, that is. My amendement to a mandatory training program would be that participants would not earn one thin dime for their participation, other than 3 hots and a cot during their training. Instead, they will be paid for their participation by their own feeling of pride in serving their country! Those who are not physically able or do not wish to be considered for the military would alternatively be able to serve in a parallel mandatory domestic improvement program that would serve in the community, cleaning up vacant lots, serving meals in homeless shelters, that kind of stuff.
What a beautiful thing to behold: America's young people, working together out in the sun, for the joy of the common cause of helping make America great and strong once again!
As to your second perspective, I have to disagree ith the lesson you have drawn from Iraq. The lesson to learn from Iraq is certainly not that our army is not big enough or that we don't user our military enough. There is absolutley no reason why America should bear the entire burden of policing the world. We can no longer afford it, for one thing. It's time for the world to recognize this. It is of no use for America to maintain its sole superpower status if it means that it will crumble under its own debts by mid-century.
Here's the deal
if our military was really geared towards defense of the nation I would support mandatory citizen training (essentially a militia). I'd do it. I'd teach my kids that it was acceptable, which is saying something if you know me and my feeling about the military.
I'm not really anti-military, I'm against belligerent militaries.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
If that's all it was geared towards
I can't see why we'd need a draft.
I don't necessarily view a police force type engagement as belligerent.
Maybe we should split the functionality in the unlikely event that there ever is sufficient support for US helping pacify hot spots. (Edit: I see you suggested something sort of similar below for international missions)
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
as to "the other persepective"
I don't think so. If a hotspot genuinely needs to be policed then there will be international support for the idea, in which case we can be part of the group. It's quite unfair the way the world expects us to be the heavy, and it's a bad precedent.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
You'd hope so, but
the UN is slow, and it only takes a few high-level opposed nations to prevent direct action.
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
I can sympathize
This is more of a "what we can do now" idea than my ideal. Ideally I'd like to cut the military budget by about a third, withdraw from our various international bases, and repurpose the military mission to be focused on national defense (rather than the current focus of being able to carry on two simultaneous foreign wars). To that end I'd cut a number of wasteful and useless programs.
In addition to our defensive military I'd like a nominal expeditionary force to be used in support of international missions. The key is not to make this force too large, so that we aren't tempted to play world cop.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
... they'd be Republicans. :)
Republican Maverick at Large
-4:Strongly Disagree; 0:Meh; +4:Strongly Agree
What's a Republican?
Is it embodied in the flesh by *drumroll please* John McCain the new and improved Reagan?
__________________________It is the economy, stupid.
No, that would be a RINO.
Republican Maverick at Large
-4:Strongly Disagree; 0:Meh; +4:Strongly Agree
So what or who is
a 'good' Republican these days as far as leadership goes. IN other words who is the 147th incarnation of Saint Ronnie R.
__________________________It is the economy, stupid.
Actually, I'm not a party guy anymore.
My previous post should have read "... they'd be conservatives."
__________________________Republican Maverick at Large
-4:Strongly Disagree; 0:Meh; +4:Strongly Agree
oh dear
Maybe you should turn your bar to black like mine.
As a homeless Republican do you see anything or anyone out there that you like?
__________________________It is the economy, stupid.