As is customary, I pretty much stayed away from the computer this Christmas. The Younger Posse Members are at that age where the holiday keeps them at a fever pitch and frankly, I’d rather be savoring the season with them than posting about the depressing news of the world.
So I come in to work today and see that Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. Uh oh.
Is it just me, or did we just lurch a little closer to the Abyss?
While I’ve never had much use for a draft, it sure seems like a good time to ramp up our military expenditures. I’d like to believe that we can muddle through the current engagements with essentially a peace-time military posture, but events could quickly overtake our rather feeble leadership.
To put it another way, I’d have a bit more optimism if we possessed another half-million active military troops and the Air Force wasn’t downsizing or flying antique aircraft.
The Wall Street Journal makes a good point about that – and I’d like to add to it. The F-15 fleet is literally falling apart because they simply were not designed to be flown this long. Fighters are agile things – training in them is punishing on both the pilot and the airframe. After years of this, things will break.
Now the good people over at the Strategy Page tend to take an Army outlook on just about everything. They don’t much care for the Navy or the Air Force, and remind me of one of the grunts I know who explained that in terms of cost, you could get an entire battalion of infantry for the cost of one operational fighter.
The problem is that this assumes that we won’t ever lose any fighters (or ships, for that matter). Right now, we still have considerable quantities of tanks in reserve. It only takes three months to make a new grunt, a little longer for a new tanker. So we can “get by” while new troops are trained up if the s**t hits the fan.
But our entire air and sea strategy is based on not losing anything. Ever. We owned the skies over Vietnam, but we still lost aircraft. If we are ever in a high-tempo shooting war, say over Taiwan, or Iran – we will quickly exhaust both the air and sea power of the United States. That hasn’t happened since 1942 and I don’t think it is a place we need to go.
I’ve never been a big fan for the “saving up for the next war ” school of thought. These are the guys who argue that we need to accept defeat in Iraq or Afghanistan because we have to save our military power for some hypothetical “total war” that may never get here. I don’t buy it. It smacks of false courage and allows someone to advocate retreat while coming across as a hardass. Running up the white flag in one nation isn’t going to make other nations trust you more. Thanks for playing.
I’d much prefer building additional capacity. If our military is “broken” or “overstretched”, then we should build it up.
Anyhow, a belated Merry Christmas. Clearly we can’t turn those swords into plowshares right away, but maybe some day.
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