talkpolitics | America's Martial Culture

malasadas.livejournal.com posting in

This weekend will mark the celebration of Memorial Day in the United States. Here in NYC, the annual Fleet Week began with a "parade" of nine warships steaming up the Hudson River. Despite our oddly American habit of honoring our military by setting fire to chunks of raw cow and drinking a lot, the holiday is an interesting moment of reflection. In my experience, we are normally called upon to thank our veterans and honor the sacrifice that a few make for the rest of the nation, and I agree that is both proper and important -- especially given how our nation has spent the past decade calling upon a comparatively small slice of our population to bear the brunt of global conflicts while the rest of the population has been urged to shop.

Namely, just how big of a military does the United States need and are we letting ourselves become a martial culture?

For a good portion of the past century, it has made a certain brutal logic for America's military to be enormous. My father was born in 1939 just as World War II was officially beginning with the invasion of Poland -- America's military industry busily supplied allied forces and soon was supplying America's efforts to bring down the Axis. Even though victory brought most of the troops home, we were soon in the Cold War, and the Baby Boom generation was born into a world with two Superpowers threatening war against each other and fighting it in proxies battles across the world. I was born in 1969 into a sort of sick stalemate where we expected global annihilation via nuclear weapons.

None of this came cheap in the size and cost of the American military. In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we talked about a "peace dividend" and saw some downscaling in personnel and presence, but very little in budget, especially for expensive equipment. Today's "global war on terorrism" may be a military conflict, but as the operation that took out Osama bin Laden demonstrated, quite a lot of that is fought most effectively with intelligence and small forces, not entire Army brigades.

Today, the American military budget is over 660 billion dollars. While this is not huge based on GDP, it is a tremendous expenditure compared to any other country. The United States armed forces maintain thousands of tanks designed to fight sweeping maneuvers across central Europe. We currently have 11 supercarriers with 3 more in production or planned. Our Air Force has over 5500 aircraft and 450 ICBMs. We have over 5100 nuclear warheads deployed, in reserve or in storage. By any stretch of the imagination, our current military power is outsized compared to the threats that we face or could face within the next decade or longer.

But it is not just the size of the U.S. armed forces that can be questioned; it is the mindset of our population towards those forces, especially when it comes to our political class and media.

While I agree that the nation should be respectful of the military and grateful for the service of its membership, our politics practically fetishizes it. The Ryan budget, hailed by Republicans as their "serious" effort to cut the deficit, slashes at entitlement spending and takes a chainsaw to much non-military discretionary spending, while taking a much more modest tack on military spending despite it being the largest discretionary portion of the budget. Politicians are required to bend over backwards to praise the military, and few dare to suggest that we can do without weapons systems. Presidential candidates who lack military service are routinely raked over coals about whether or not they are "qualified" to be Commander in Chief even though the position is explicitly a civilian one. Public celebrations of all kind focus on honoring military service.

This isn't easy -- a proper balance between rightfully honoring and creepily fetishizing is probably impossible to define, but the longer I watch our political and media personae, the more it is obvious that our tremendous military exists not merely because of political calculations but also because of a culture we all help create.

What would be the RIGHT size for the U.S. military in 2011? And would our culture ever actually allow it?

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From:

underlankers.livejournal.com

US culture has always been warlike, it's just never been military. A more modern military would emphasize mobility and firepower, and not be geared for massive set-piece nuclear wars as we've nobody who could fight that kind of thing with us in the first place. The fighters would actually work even if you cough near them, the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles would be green, and the US Army's firepower as far as I know is still well ahead of everybody.

As far as accepting it.....I think that it would require the entire Republican Congressional delegation to undergo a complete personality transplant first.

From:

underlankers.livejournal.com

In particular the USA should scrap the F-22 and F-35, overpriced parade-ground bullshit that would fail on the battlefield. The more we spend on it, the more we throw good money after bad. The US government should also focus greater effort on the kind of military needed to fight urban counterinsurgency campaigns, which is what war's going to look more like these days. The massive bomber fleets of WWII weren't able to do much against guys like Tito in WWII, and there's no USSR that justifies them.

The USA could also prune back its nuclear arsenal and anachronistic military bases while increasing its soldiers in bases where they really might be needed (see: South Korea). The USA currently could stagnate for 30 years and it'd still be where it is now compared to the rest of the world for the entirety of that 30 years. There's no reason we can't work smarter, not harder.

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