Military spending by country, 2008
Here’s a truth for you. No one, and I mean no one, can invade the US. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 nations combined, and more naval tonnage than the next 13 navies combined. For this the US gets an army which, sorry American jingoists, is bloody awful at brushfire wars.
The US army should be cut in three quarters, at the very least. The air force should be disbanded, since it refuses to do its job anymore (it hates doing close support of troops and its planes are too expensive to be used in most circumstances, which is one main reason for the rise of drones) and the army and navy can pick up the necessary pieces.
The navy should be America’s main arm, but even it needs some cuts, and the carrier flotillas need a serious rethink, they’re nothing but big targets in the case of a war against a real enemy.. The army should be a much smaller expeditionary force, designed so it can be ramped up in the case of the sort of war that requires a mobilization.
The US cannot afford its current military. The budget should be cut in half, at a minimum. That budget, and the huge distortions that the military industrial complex is inflicting on America, are a large part of what is destroying America as an economic power. The best and smartest techies are flooding into the military industrial complex as fast as they can get security clearances, because post dot-com bubble it pays far better and has far better salaries than any other part of the economy except the financial industry. Certainly the military industry isn’t the only thing destroy America’s economy (who needs them when you have the banks) but in the long term, they’re doing more than their fair share.
With a much smaller expeditionary force the US will stick to bombing and shelling, and occasionally kick over small Caribbean countries, which is as it should be, because even the large army has proved radically bloody incompetent at very great cost for almost zero results (what, exactly, is the benefit to the US of the Iraq war? An Iraq aligned with Iran?)
And Americans need to stop talking about being invaded. No one can, no one will. You’re a continental power with a huge nuclear arsenal, even if they could get to your borders, the idea of invading a continental mass the size of the US is insane: there is no one who can do it.
Go back to a pre-WWII army, with a relatively large navy (though not as large as what you have, which is over 50% of the entire world’s naval tonnage). You’ll be fine. Honest. And so will the world. The world is not being made safer by US brushfire wars and neither is America.
And hey, maybe you can take the money and give yourselves real universal healthcare as opposed to some garbage bill that forces you to buy insurance you can’t afford to use.
