Well, I hope you guys are right about the ABM defenses and that we won't get into a war with China. Either way it doesn't seem like a good thing to bet the future of the military on. Aircraft carriers are vulnerable things. If the propulsion or rudders are taken out, or the flight deck is damaged, it's pretty much out of the fight indefinitely.
As to whether to expand or contract the military as a whole, that's a different question altogether. We have spread ourselves very thin and are provably unable to even defend our own borders. IMO we should go back to a strongly defensive stance and let it be known that we are not to be messed with, but by the same token we will be very reluctant to get involved in any war where we're not directly attacked. It's not our job to protect the world from aggression. If some country is invaded, too bad for them if they're not strong enough to defend themselves. There's no reason for us to get involved.... there's no reason for American soldiers to be killed defending foreign soil. "Peacekeeping" is a farce. If there's people out there in the world that want to kill each other, let 'em kill each other. Better than getting in the middle so that they both want to kill *us* (and have the opportunity to do so).
As has been shown; we do not presently have the capability to effectively fight a prolonged two front war - both politically and military.
Pssssh. We don't have the capability to fight the kind of wars we're fighting now, in the way in which we're fighting them. If we took the gloves off, Iraq and Afghanistan could be pacified in weeks. We aren't fighting against ranked masses of soldiers... we're fighting against small groups who blend in with the civilian population. If we really wanted to win, we would accept the fact that significant civilian casualties are inevitable. Vietnam took away our political will to accept such losses.
As I stated earlier in the thread, I really don't think we should be in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor earlier in Vietnam or Korea. What the Iraqis and the Vietnamese do is up to them. IMO, no American soldier should ever be put into harm's way to defend an Afghan or a Korean. (Our soldiers are sworn to defend the United States and the U.S. Constitution... not the Iraqi Constitution! And no amount of foreigners' lives are worth the life of one American. This may sound harsh, but if we don't adopt that stance then we are on the slippery slope to being the world's policeman.) But since our glorious leaders have decided to drag us into these hellholes, the least they could do is not tie the military's hands behind its back.
What I advocate is a policy of measured disengagement. We can't withdraw from our overseas bases overnight.... that would leave a dangerous power vacuum and constitute sort of a breach of contract with our allies. But we should start pulling troops out gradually, over a decade or so, and push to make friendly nations self-reliant on their own defenses instead of depending on us. If they want to buy hardware from us, no problem. If they want training and consulting, there are several major US defense firms that will be happy to do so -- for a fee, of course.
But in the end I couldn't give a rat's ass about the Emir of Kuwait or the King of Saudi Arabia -- as far as I'm concerned, they're dictators, and I wouldn't live under them myself, so I wouldn't expect self-respecting Kuwaitis or Saudis to do so either. I certainly don't want my own countrymen to die defending them and their way of life. You can talk about strategic oil concerns all day -- in 1991, Saddam Hussein would have been happy to sell us all the oil in Kuwait. It really doesn't matter who's in charge over there; they will want our money, and they won't have anything better to do with their oil. They'll sell it to us, if we let them.
Anyway, I know this post has dragged this conversation pretty far off-base, but I just thought I'd throw that out there to give you all an idea of my worldview. (Hopefully I will stay out of P&N in the future.... what a timesink!) I'm going on vacation tomorrow, I've got a ton of work to finish up before I leave, and I won't be able to respond to this thread for over a week, so you really shouldn't bother replying. Sorry to drop out like that.
..damn it. I'm at that point where I'm so close to just clicking "close" on the tab and forgetting about this thread. But then I look at how much I typed above. That was a lot of work and a lot of time. bah. Feel free to disregard this entire post, but I can't bring myself to delete it.
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