Is President Obama's intention to create a leaner military a "pragmatic vision" that takes into account our deep fiscal problems?
It is based on the idea that the country must be smarter and more restrained in its use of force — a relief after President George W. Bush's disastrous war in Iraq. It will mean a significant reduction in the size of the Army and Marine Corps. But it doesn't minimize the fact that the world is a very dangerous place and says the country must still be ready to fight a major land war — although one lasting for years would require.
Or are the proposed cuts indefensible?
This will have consequences. Reducing our war-fighting capabilities can only be interpreted as an aggregate disengagement of U.S. power, or the potential use of power, that will cause global actors to think and decide differently — starting not next decade or next year, but today. It will change the way we think and decide as well. Since a nation with decreased capability tends to change its behavior to match that capability, the next few years could see a United States acting less muscularly simply because it has less muscle — regardless of what the right policies might be.
This sounds about right to me:
Of course, we avoid those wars through the use of our dominating naval and air power, and China has become a long-term threat in the Pacific to the former. We do need to invest in bolstering our Pacific fleet, and we should reconsider our security arrangements with western Europe, which can and should shoulder the costs of their own security. Those are healthy areas for consideration, but cutting tens of thousands of troops sounds like a dangerous direction for the US at this time.
It's always worth debating how strong we have to be to stay safe. How many ground troops do we really need, and how big should the budget really be, and do we really have to always be ready for two ground wars? The trouble is that it's hard to take the debate seriously when you don't trust the competence of the commander in chief. The political cliche has always been that Democrats come along and gut the military, then the Republicans have to fix the resulting mess. Not always true, but President Obama sure seems to be living up to it.
Providing for the national defense is a constitutional requirement of the federal government. Redistributing wealth through transfer payments is not. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected president, defense spending was 52 percent of the budget and 9 percent of GDP. Today, it's 19 percent of the budget and 4 percent of GDP. Social spending (payments to individuals), on the other hand, has gone from 26 percent to 64 percent and growing. We can argue about how much mois appropraite for either task,
