With Iran's recent despicable kidnapping of British sailors and the epimethean surge of American troops into Iraq, the specter of war mars the beautiful spring weather. Neither the war on terror nor the war in Iraq have affected the day-to-day life of the American public, putting the lie to the common characterization of the conflicts as great struggles for the very existence of the United States. As the wars continue to escalate, deepening hatred of Israel and the United States in the Middle East, the United States' armed forces are stretching paper-thin.
Although the military is spread out like butter on toast, the Bush administration continues to dredge up more troops from thin air by calling up exhausted reserves, instead of asking the people of the United States to sacrifice for the war. Clearly, the U.S. military is in its current form not well suited to occupation, though it is very adept at blowing up and sinking things.
In fact, the American military is currently geared toward destroying enemy armed forces. A remnant of World War II, when America had to mobilize its entire economy for the war, build a military and send it across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to invade its enemies, the military now exists to project American military might across the world. We have 12 carrier task forces - four at sea right now - and three ready to surge in an emergency. We have 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines, each carrying enough nuclear ordinance to single-handedly destroy a country.
The question now is, why is our military so powerful? We spend over $450 billion each year on it; the current budget deficit is about $200 billion. If we slashed military spending in half, even, we could solve our budget problems in one fell swoop.
Why do we have a projective military? To be honest, the only foreseeable use for one right now is to bully other countries into submission or invade them. No possible enemy exists that could challenge our technological and tactical superiority; any enemy that could conceivably even test it is either on good terms with us or so economically close war is untenable. In the foreseeable future, there is nobody who could even approach invading the United States even if our military were a tithe of its current strength.
The only conceivable use for a projective military right now is invading countries that can't touch our ability to fight - for example, see Iraq: It was a cakewalk; however, once we invade a country, our stubbornness and regional security interests demand that we remain in the country, occupy it long-term and fix it. The military is great at knocking countries down, but terrible at fixing them.
It therefore seems to be in our long-term interests, both fiscal and national security-wise, to simply scale back our military to a regional defense force. No country exists that could challenge us even then, and there is no reason to discard the potential to rebuild our military to the projective juggernaut it currently is.
The alternative to cutting back our military is to build it up into a huge imperial force; but our country lacks the will to actually follow through on imperial commitments, let alone the will to offer up young men for conscription. For now the U.S. military exists only to destroy countries it cannot rebuild; scaling back the military provides benefits that far outweigh any possible consequences.
Write to Neal atnecoleman@bsu.edu
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