RE: World threats are worse...Military getting smaller
Also posted on Memphis political/religious board:
As I see it, we have three threat areas--Russia, China, and some rogue nation in the Middle East. Russia and China can potentially threaten us with nukes, the rogue Middle Eastern nation could threaten us with terror (they won't have a delivery vehicle to hit us with nukes for decades if not centuries). So step one is to make certain we are covered against those threats. That requires technology more than numbers. And a recognition that a lot of the terror threat loses interest if we quit trying to micromanage their internal affairs.
Now look at numbers. Bring home the troops deployed overseas in peacetime roles. That saves $20 billion in operating costs. Convert those from active duty positions to reserve positions. You can swap 400,000 actives for a million reservists and still save $20 billion. And you've substantially increased end strength if the balloon really goes up. The secret to having a powerful military at a sustainable cost is to keep a large portion of the force at a lowered state of readiness until needed. This also eliminates or at least significantly reduces the political temptation to meddle in other people's business as this force would be unsuited for that purpose. That's a good thing, a very good thing.
As for procurement, get away from paying out the nose for unproved cutting edge technology in everything we buy. Go back to Elmo Zumwalt's high/low mix procurement strategy that built the navy which ended the Cold War. The exotic stuff is really, really cool (when it works) and we need some of it to keep pace. But fill out the numbers with cheaper, proved technologies. We need fifth generation fighters if we have to take on Russia. But we don't need them against ISIS, if we choose to fight them. And even against Russia we're not going to see that much cutting edge stuff. They believe that quantity has a quality of its own, so they're going to throw a high-low mix at us, with more on the low end. We don't need to overspend on things like the F-35, the Ford carriers, the Zumwalt cruisers/destroyers (Elmo must be turning over in his grave), the LCSs, the San Antonio LPDs, and far too many others. We don't need Arleigh Burkes doing pirate patrol in the IO; it's not even a job they are particularly good at. And get their full useful life out of them. Don't go taking them out of service while they are still useful (A-10, Burkes, Perrys, for starters). Also, do design to cost, where we lock in a price and tell the contractor to give us the best he can for that price, instead of endless expensive change orders. And work with NATO allies to use a lot of their designs instead of having to invent everything from scratch. Saves design costs and overhead here, longer production runs allow allies to save costs and more fully equip their "for but not with" designs, and interoperability is increased. But keep focus so projects don't turn into F-35's. We built a minesweeper class supposedly based on the Italian Lerici class. But the Lericis were 700 tons, and the MCMs were 1500 tons. We can't have that kind of mission creep.
Armies are good at two things, per Norman Schwarzkopf--killing people and breaking things. So focus on war fighting and get rid of the extraneous stuff. McKinsey did a study of defense costs for OECD countries. The average OECD country spends 14% of its defense budget on combat, 23% on combat support, and 63% on admin and overhead. That's bad enough. But the US is far worse--9% combat, 14% combat support, 77% admin/overhead. Does that give you an idea how much we are wasting? Out of a roughly $600 billion current defense budget, some $150 billion is combat and combat support. If we were merely as efficient as our OECD brethren, we could spend that much on mission with a $400 billion total defense budget. Or preferably, we could spend $450-500 million with substantially increased combat capability and readiness. And focus that incremental readiness on dealing with the existential threats--nukes and terror. Get out of the nation-building business and save the money we are wasting trying to make people like us. Make them respect us--and fear us, if necessary.
Now go back to the threats. Russia is a land power with little capability to project beyond the GIUK gap, the Baltic, or the Black Sea (maybe the Med). They threaten Europe, that's pretty much it. China is also a land power, albeit one that is flexing its naval muscles a bit. They threaten the countries around the China Sea, but that's pretty much it. The Middle Eastern countries threaten each other, but none of them have any serious power projection capability. So let the allies defend themselves within the regions, with our reserve forces as a backup. Focus the Navy on containing those threats in the respective local areas and preventing any breakouts. Focus the Army and Air Force on what Gen. Milley calls the higher-end threats. Repurpose the Marines as commando and asymmetric warfare specialists, which fits well with their historic expeditionary force mission. In today's world, we need a much larger special forces than just the Green Berets, SEALs, and AFSOC. Those forces would be retained and would focus on working with Marines as liaison with Army/Navy/Air Force as needed.
Finally, never fight a war you don't intend to win. If we are ready to go in full-bore with overwhelming force and wide open rules of engagement, then go in, kill everybody who needs killing, break everything that needs breaking, and get the hell out, after making sure that whomever we leave in charge understands very clearly that if they don't behave we will be back to kill them. If we're not ready to do that, or the objective doesn't justify that, then don't risk one American life or limb in a half-assed military effort.
That's a leaner and meaner military that costs less and fights best. It wouldn't be worth a damn at nation-building, which is a good thing because we don't have any business nation-building.
(This post was last modified: 07-23-2015 08:32 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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World threats are worse...Military getting smaller
