This is what U.S. military spending looks like over a little more than 2 decades:
(Data soure: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.)
So much for the Peace Dividend that followed the end of the Cold War. Apparently, fighting a rag-tag bunch of cave-dwellers requires the same level of funding as keeping up with mighty Soviet Union.
If we want a return to the glory days of a balanced federal budget–you know, like we saw during the last year of the Clinton administration, we should
- Let the budget busting Bush tax cuts expire. The second major experiment with Trickle-Down economics proved to be an abject failure. It is time for grown-up economic principles to be used for tax policy.
- Cut military spending to late 1990s levels. The proposed Ryan budget would, literally, cause higher death rates for the most vulnerable Americans, who would no longer be able to afford some types of health care. Quality of life would go down drastically for Seniors and people with disabilities.
It’s immoral to allow military spending to increase far greater than inflation, and ask seniors and the disabled to pay for it with their life!
And if you believe that military spending pays us back by stimulating the economy, think again. A study by University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee political scientist Prof. Uk Heo finds:
…a 1 percent increase in the defense spending share of GDP in the United States is expected to lead to a 0.019 percent increase in economic growth over two years. This result indicates that the economic effects of defense spending on growth in the United States are meaningless because the size of the effects is virtually zero.
Military spending, at least at today’s levels, turns out to be a really, really lousy investment.
Great post!
Takes guts to write something like this in Boeing country, never mind Hanford, Bremerton, Ft Lewis and McChord.
You’re OK letting the tax cuts expire at ALL levels of income, then, right? This was Orszag’s argument, come 2013.
Because eliminating them only for the highest brackets isn’t going to get the job done.
Of course you are. If you are not, your argument is weakened to the point of irrelevance.
Let’s let all of the Starbucks-slurping, Microsoft-working leftniks see their taxes go up, and see how the argument progresses. After all, Obama appointed Orszag. He must have thought much of Orszag’s ideas, right?
@2
You forgot Everett, Bangor, Indian Island, Manchester (might not be Navy anymore), Fairchild AFB, Yakima training center, I’m sure I’m missing a few.
We also have several Coast Guard and National Guard bases, but I think we need those.
Um… The tax cuts apply to income, where you work or what your political ideology might be hasn’t a thing to do with it. Seeing how most Microsoft employees are high income earners I’m sure the tax cut and its repeal would apply some Microsoft employees.
Manchester’s still Navy.
“Apparently, fighting a rag-tag bunch of cave-dwellers requires the same level of funding as keeping up with mighty Soviet Union.”
No it doesn’t. But being the world’s police and sole empire DOES require ALL of our money. How many bases does the United States have in other countries? Over 300…how many bases does China have in Canada, Brazil, Italy, Norway, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam? Go on … guess! They’re our major ‘bogeyman’ since the USSR fell. Go on…guess how many bases China has in the UK, and Japan, and Germany, and France? Go on…guess!
(HINT…you will only need the fingers on one hand!)
Defending our boarders would cost about $50B to $100B a year. The rest is spent playing cop to the planet. Neat if we want to control everything and have the cash to do it.
Here’s a link:
http://www.kansascityfed.org/P.....lliams.pdf
to a government report in which there’s a nice little graph showing defense spending relative to GDP. Looked at in a different context, it doesn’t look all that substantial, particularly as GDP has risen substantially since, say ’96 or so.
KC Fed also thinks military spending has been beneficial for the economy but what do they know.
We need a commitment from our congress people to bring the troops home. Anyone have an idea as to how to get the Senators and others on board with this?
@8
Darwhyle’s arguement just crashed and burned.
@3
So in love with your own fallacies of tax rates you don’t actually think, eh?
Yes, the Bush tax cuts dropped the lowest tax rate from 15% to 10%. But it also dropped the income level to qualify for the lower rate by more than half. In fact, almost 75%.
You think you’re clever because you assume that if we balance the budget by letting the Bush tax cuts expire, new tax codes CAN’T be written to not only keep the 10% marginal rate but ALSO raise the income level to qualify for that 10% rate.
In short, you are ignorant. Here’s data from a crazy right wing anti-tax foundation…
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/.....ual-1.html
We need to go back to Clinton’s taxes too. For many years, federal taxes were 18% to 19% of GNP. I think Clinton had them slightly higher than that, and actually got into surplus territory for a while. GW Bush got them reduced to 15% of GDP, and they have remained there.
Spending was consistently 20% or so of GNP, but the massive increases under both GW Bush and Obama have pushed this to 25% of GNP.
Right now, the federal government is borrowing more than 40% of every dollar that it is spending — which is INSANE!
We need to get rid of the Bush tax cuts soon. Even with the reduced spending the Republicans are proposing, total tax revenue would still fall FAR below proposed government spending.
But Darryl’s defense analysis is BRILLIANT!
We are spending about $300 billion a year more in current dollars, than we were back in the late 1990’s. The Republicans want to cut half a trillion, but they don’t want to cut defense at all.
We should cut the defense. There is no reason the United States needs foreign military bases. We may have an alliance in NATO with the UK, France and Germany, etc., but those countries don’t have their troops based in other alliance countries, and neither should we.
If we make these defense cuts, we could cut more than the $500 billion the Republicans want, with far smaller cuts to health care and other needed social services.
And if we go back to the historical tax rates of the Clinton era (back when the Republicans controlled both houses of congress), we could actually balance the budget again.
To understand why this lunacy continues, you have to look at the true motivations behind its continuation. “Common good” is a completely foreign concept to those making the decisions–if you personally (or your corporation) accrue large profits from military spending, who gives a rat’s ass whether it stimulates growth of the economy as a whole? In fact, you probably hope it doesn’t, because then the wealth you’re accumulating stacks up higher against everyone else’s.
I believe that Clinton was almost overthrown in a military coup due to the defense budget cuts during his administration. There will have to be strong general support for defense cuts before they can be a reality.
Clinton’s cuts also involved the CIA and intelligence gathering services
we see how well that worked…..
Uhhh.. The red at the bottom of the chart was due to the policies of one Papa Bush. It shows a decreasing trend in military spending.
And I believe on Clinton’s watch an economic BOOM occurred.
Sometimes useful things spin off of military spending. We got this internet we type over from military spending. And right now many energy technologies are tried out first by the military. Something might come from that. Might…
But I have no problem in principle with military spending returning to what it was in the nineties.
Gee, a 75% increase in military spending during the Bush years, while slashing revenues and borrowing from China to give tax breaks to billionaires, and now these same borrow-and-spend freaks are screeching about “DEFICITS!” and “DEBT!” but they only want to cut social programs that help people not military spending to kill people!!! Why would anyone vote for Republicans unless they hate themselves and the whole human race??
Republican hypocrisy is on full, sickening, stomach-turning display in this graph.
Not only would a real dumbfuck make a statement like that, but a real dumbfuck would make that statement where other people could se it.
Sure, fuckhead…that’s exactly what happened…if you believe in wingnuttia.
I would like to see military spending increased for higher pay to the troops and better VA facilities – especially since we are fitting 2 wars.
Bob @ 3,
“You’re OK letting the tax cuts expire at ALL levels of income, then, right?”
I am! In fact, the Bush tax cuts (followed by Bush’s Great Big Unfunded Military Adventures) have allowed us to badly dug ourselves into to a pit of debt. I believe the ethical thing to do is raise taxes above the Clinton-era levels to pay off debt at a higher rater than we were doing at the end of the Clinton administration.
I don’t think it is particularly moral to punish future generations for our fiscal recklessness—especially considering the lack of any new real investment they will be receiving for the debt.
@2 You remind me of a conversation I had on a bus shortly after I came home from Vietnam. Basically the guy said our government should continue fighting the war because “we need the jobs.” That was easy for him to say; his kids weren’t dying in Vietnam.
@3 Given that the rich got the lion’s share of the tax cuts, it’s only fair that the rich should pay the lion’s share of any tax increases we need now.
@7 You really think we can defend our country on $50-100B a year? The CIA budget alone is north of $40B. Ordinary maintenance of our nuclear arsenal costs billions. What’s your idea of “defending our boarders” (sic)? Building a fence and stationing Border Patrol agents every 100 yards? How does that keep out Russian, Chinese, or North Korean ICBMs? How would we keep the sea lanes open for trade without a bluewater Navy? You wanna cut spending, yeah, you can cut tens or maybe hundreds of billions from defense by buying fewer weapons and staying out of the world’s shit holes. It costs some money to play cop — every cruise missile fired at Gadhafi sets us back millions. So just let guys like him do whatever they want to … shell cities, blow up civilian airliners, etc.
@8 That’s all well and good, Bob, but since the richest 5% have gotten all of the GDP gains of the last 40 years, it follows that the richest 5% should pay for all of the increased defense spending of the last 40 years, too.
@21 Then surely you’re willing to pay higher taxes too? No? Oh, I see, you want to borrow even more money from China …
I would be okay with letting all the Bush tax cuts expire. The middle class tax cuts didn’t add very much to the deficit, because the middle class didn’t get very much of a tax cut, but if that’s what it takes to get people to agree to taxing the big fish I’ll go along with it.
Yep the Straits of Hormuz is quite a choke point for the oil the world needs to run.
@27
No, I would repurpose the money from elsewhere, including from elsewhere in the military budget.
@30 Repurpose. Now there’s a word. And here’s an idea: For every $150,000-a-year “private security contractor” we eliminate from the budget, we can give a hundred $15,000-a-year Army soldiers a 10% raise.
@30 I can readily see you “repurposing” money from unemployment benefits, food stamps, Pell grants, and Medicaid for the poor to military spending. That’s not an original idea. It’s what the whole Republican Party wants to do.
I say let’s end the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters. Then look are leaving all those countries we’ve been hanging-out in for the past 60+ years. Do we need to have a military presence in Germany, for instance? How about South Korea? If Koreans can manufacture KIAs, bring ’em over here and sell them at a profit, I think they can handle North Korea’s “threats.”
If we were put out minds to it, we can reduce our military presence in all these countries from over 900 bases overseas down to zero. It will take some time, but I think we can return to a military isolationism and get the hell out of this mess with which we’ve been entangled for so damn long! Enough already! Let’s start minding our own business and looking out for ourselves.
I don’t think it is particularly moral to punish future generations for our fiscal recklessness…
Darryl,
Future generations are not “punished” by our “fiscal recklessness”. Future generations, just like ours, and just like our fathers (recall the massive debt built up by WWII?)will take care of themselves. What punishes future generations is foregone output. Labor idled today cannot be “recovered” in the future. It’s gone forever. Foregone investment today means a smaller base from which to build prosperity in the future.
When you put this argument in terms of “affording it” you buy into the conservative framework. It’s not about the money. The government can create as much money as it wants any time it wants. It about politics and who gets what REAL output. The money is ancillary.
Same for RRabbit. He raises the Chinese bogeyman all the time. This is not correct. The Chinese are currently disposed to trade their real goods for pieces of our paper. Now ask yourself…who’s getting the best of that bargain? In the meantime our displaced workers should be put to work building the physical infrastructure for the future. With all these foreigners willing to do just about anything for our useless little green bits of paper, now is certainly the time.
Wouldn’t you agree?
@11 czechsaaz wins this thread hands down.
Simple. Devastating. My hat’s off to you sir/madam. Good job.
Military spending has a very low multiplier, especially since the hardware is made to be either blown up or go unused. And yes, military spending as a % of GNP is going down slightly. But that is no reason why we have to spend as much on so-called “defense” as the rest of the world combined. That is madness. Even more troubling is the the institutional throw-weight built up as a result is highly detrimental to our democracy. Rome’s republic wrestled with this urge for several hundred years before succumbing to Caesar. I don’t think we’ll get that long unless something changes soon.
“The CIA budget alone is north of $40B.”
Yep. And they get it wrong just about always. Or they meddle in favor of fascists elements in other countries. Or they do stupid stuff like the Bay of Pigs. Yessiree, a real valuable investment…..NOT.
I could do better “foreign intelligence” by simply flipping coins…and for a lot less cost.
Darryl, Rabbit: Assume the chinese showed up at the Treasury and demanded to redeem their bonds. What would they get? They would get a pile of dollars. What would they do with those? They could burn them, buy somebody else’s bonds, or spend them. Maybe they’d even buy some of the bits of real stuff we still make. How could that hurt?
Remember the 80’s? Everybody thought the Japanese would simply buy everything in sight and own the world? Fuck. They bought Pebble Beach! I’m so scared!!!!
How’d that turn out, eh?
“How would we keep the sea lanes open for trade without a bluewater Navy?”
Fuck all. I just dunno’. How about we do it the same way the Chinese, Japanese, etc., do it. Hire somebody else. Oh, wait, that would be us. And what do we get out of this grand bargain? A bloated military. A skewed democracy. A wasteful allocation of resources. The ability to kick sand in some lightweight dictator’s face? Is it worth it?
I bet if we hired the Chinese or the Japanese to do this they would want a much higher price for the service. So who is being the fool here?
@15 Cutting their budgets is one thing. Ignoring them when they sounded the alarm about a clear and present danger is another.
Now, who in the world would be dumb enough to do that?
I’ve told people for years that around the end of the 1980’s we did what was simultaneously the smartest and the dumbest thing we’d done in at least 100 years: ended the Cold War. It had justified doing a lot of good stuff, albeit for the wrong reasons. Start with going to the moon. Add LBJ’s “Great Society” programs, which can be viewed on one level as an orchestrated demonstration to the rest of the world that we were strong and rich enough to have “guns” (Vietnam, etc) and “butter” (social programs on a grand scale)–while the USSR did stuff like starve people in rural areas to create an appearance of prosperity for the Moscow Olympics. Hey, when we boycotted those, we did our own home-grown “Goodwill Games” which was one of the coolest things ever to happen around here. Oh, yeah…we also lavished money on public education (to train new generations of rocket scientists) and academic research of all sorts.
Once we no longer had the big bad Rooskies to play against, we seemed to lose a fair portion of our national identity and sense of purpose, and we’ve been searching for them ever since. What have we accomplished? Well, we’ve developed all sorts of cool technology, most of it derived from defense and space programs. We had one economic bubble based on using this new-fangled Internet gizmo to sell books and bling and pornography, and another based on dreaming up all sorts of complex new ways to rip off small investors and home buyers. And a very few of us managed to become wildly rich. More of us got bored enough to sit at home like a bunch of dorks watching “Jersey Shore”.
Compared to walking on the moon, somehow it doesn’t seem the same.
@41: We coulda’ been a contendah!
@31
works for me….never been a fan of the private military contractors in the first place.
[Deleted — see HA Comment Policy]
@33
I pretty much agree…although I would leave open a few choice naval bases.
and while we are going the isolationist route, lets end foreign aid too…let the other countries take care of themselves.
Art @ 41
While I think there are other causes at play, I think your point is well-taken. As a nation, we’ve turned inward (Bush’s bellicosity aside) and don’t seem to have any sort of unifying congealer since the Cold War ended. Part of that is also the fundamentalist/Talibanic tone and tenor of the Republican Party that has been growing over the last 30 to 40 years. I do, of course, put most of the blame for the disintegration of any sort of sense of national unity on wingnuttia.
Bob @ 8,
“a government report in which there’s a nice little graph showing defense spending relative to GDP. Looked at in a different context, it doesn’t look all that substantial, particularly as GDP has risen substantially since, say ‘96 or so.”
The data source I link to also provide those data. Here’s the graph….
The ratio has risen from 3 to almost 5 from 1999 to 2009.
“KC Fed also thinks military spending has been beneficial for the economy but what do they know.”
In fact, their one-page review of the literature
does not support an overall economic benefit of military spending (pg 52):
They cite a few additional studies and conclude that there may be short term benefits for some long term negatives.
The only original analysis in the report was for a particular congressional district, which they say did better than the country overall.
The paper I cited (second link) is a recently-published peer-reviewed publication that was designed to advance the art of such analyses.
In other words, your source summarized the older literature and said the effects of military spending are unclear because of contradictory results. The study I cited did an empirical analysis using a new, more refined model and found no significant effect.
@47, Darryl: Defense spending as a % of GDP has been trending downward since the Korean War. So when wingers whine to you about “Clinton’s massive military spending cuts” tell them to kindly fuck off
Thank you.
#34’s got it about right.
First thing to do is cut down the size of the Navy. We have more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined, last I checked. Maybe sell a few of the more late-model ships off, say to friendly nations like Australia. Next, get rid of the entire ballsitic-missile submarine fleet. The whole damn lot of them. They worked well at keeping the Soviets in check, but they’re utterly useless against a single man with a dynamite vest. Sorry Roger, but there’s just no reason to keep them around any longer. And we still have our land-based nuclear deterrent, but let’s phase that down to where there’s no more than a few hundred nukes in place. We’ll have to keep some around regardless of what others may think.
Domestic and overseas base closings have to come next. We’d see some losses up here (mostly at Bangor), but JBLM and the rest of the Naval facilities would probably just trimmed of a bit of fat, seeing that they’re the closest bases we have to Asia. Overseas, why not scale back to just a few bases that would still allow us to respond to threats beyond our borders.
Next, it’s time to kill off NATO. It served its purpose, but now let’s recast it as a true European Defense Organization, with the US and Canada only minimally involved if at all. Europe can take care of itself now, so why maintain forces there unnecessarily?
Beyond that, let’s spend more on the soldiers putting their necks on the line – before, during, and after their time on the line – than on the corporate welfare of ridiculously expensive new weapons systems that probably wouldn’t be of much use to the soldier in his foxhole.
Proud @ 34,
‘Future generations are not “punished” by our “fiscal recklessness”. Future generations, just like ours, and just like our fathers (recall the massive debt built up by WWII?)will take care of themselves. What punishes future generations is foregone output. Labor idled today cannot be “recovered” in the future. It’s gone forever. Foregone investment today means a smaller base from which to build prosperity in the future.’
Missed opportunity is certainly part of what I mean by “punishment.” Additionally, it’s no fun inheriting a debt so large that a big chunk of each tax dollar goes to pay interest. That’s money that could have been invested in useful stuff. This is particularly so when a sizable chunk of the public debt is foreign owned, and therefore more likely to strengthen a foreign economy.
‘When you put this argument in terms of “affording it” you buy into the conservative framework.’
When it comes to fiscal politics, I am a moderate, if not a conservative. I spent most of the Bush administration bitching about tax breaks for the rich, repeated raising of the debt limit, and spending like a meth addict with a pile of stolen credit cards for shit like blowing up buildings and then paying to rebuild them. It was lunacy. Bush got a pass from me on TARP and the auto bailouts because he was (finally) convinced correctly that not doing so would likely be very painful for the economy. That was an investment, and one that becomes impossible with too much debt (like, you know, Iceland).
I have many of the same complaints about Obama, like his inability to resist re-upping Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Obama gets the same break with the stimulus package from me—this is genuine investment in the future, although I would have liked to see more. (When a wind storm rips the roof off of your house, its a good time to take out a great big loan as quickly as possible.)
“It’s not about the money. The government can create as much money as it wants any time it wants. It about politics and who gets what REAL output. The money is ancillary.”
I doubt the government can create as much money as it wants without negative medium- and long-term consequences. As we’ve seen in other countries a high public debt to GDP ratio and bank (the other big creators of money) “liabilities” have caused credit ratings to decline, further increasing the cost of creating money.
@50
They’d make nice artificial reefs or provide one hell of a lot of recycled material that we could get for cheap. And cutting them up could provide jobs in the US. We sell them to Australia and then China gets nervous and builds a few aircraft carriers and then Taiwan gets nervous and builds a few more and then Indonesia gets nervous and builds a few of their own… We’re better off just cutting the things up.
A bunch of them are in dry dock at Bremerton getting converted over to research and spy duty right now. You can see them from the Bremerton-Port Orchard foot ferry.
Which gobs and gobs of high-level ex military folks have signed off on getting rid of in it’s entirety.
Which we should have started on the day after Obama took office. Not sure if they still have it, but the army used to own its own ski resort in Germany. WTF???
Yep, all we need to be able to do is store some stuff and be able to use their navy bases and airports if there’s a big to-do going on.
Yes!
@37 Sometimes you could do better foreign intelligence by reading a newspaper.
@34 I think you’re a little too facile about what happens when the Chinese start trading our “paper” for goods. Don’t forget, other people take our “paper” for their goods — especially oil producers. Sure, our government can make more “paper” but not without destroying our own savings along with the Chinese’s.
Some of the other arguments here are a little too facile, too. Russia still has ICBMs and MIRVs. It doesn’t have a Bolshevik government anymore, but it does have a gangster government run by people with more or less the same mindset. (See, e.g., Chechnya.) So it might be a good idea to keep a few Tridents in service, just as insurance.
Basically, what I’ve argued here is that it’s not practical to cut defense spending back to almost nothing, as some have suggested. And as I’m not an advocate of standing around with our hands in our pockets while others commit genocide, I think we should keep some of our aircraft carriers in service, too.
That said, it’s possible to cut defense spending. We can shutter some of the foreign bases, scale back weapons purchases, and jettison some of our Cold War relics without opening ourselves up to attack.
“Don’t forget, other people take our “paper” for their goods — especially oil producers.”
Like so what? Other people take our paper because of our power and our willingness to project it. Our currency is the world “reserve” currency. This is nice. We reap benefits–people give us stuff. We give them pieces of paper created from thin air. But we pay a very high price for this.
1. We have to skew our resources to maintain our power (ie-massive defense spending). This has never worked out in the long run for anybody. What makes you think this time will be different?
2. This leads to the “high dollar”. A strong dollar kills our export industries (prices for our goods are high in relation to good priced in other currencies) and encourages imports (we buy “cheap” stuff made somewhere else).
3. A strong dollar is basically a subsidy to the rentier class and is biased toward lenders. Robert Rubin was the big champion of the strong dollar under Clinton. Bob Rubin is also a big banker.
I doubt the government can create as much money as it wants without negative medium- and long-term consequences. As we’ve seen in other countries a high public debt to GDP ratio and bank (the other big creators of money) “liabilities” have caused credit ratings to decline, further increasing the cost of creating money.
A government that issues its own sovereign currency and allows that currency to float freely against other currencies is not constrained in the way you seem to think, Darryl. Japan has a debt/GNP ratio of 200%. It is able to sell government bonds at very low interest rates. I don’t read articles in the newspapers that Japan has “mortgaged its future”. Greece, etc., are not sovereign issuers of their own currency. They are tied to the Euro. Conflating Greece with our situation is apples and oranges.
I’d suggest you expand your economic horizons to include folks like Jaimie Galbraith, Dean Baker, and this guy
For a little marxist flavor, I’d suggest Doug Henwood. There’s a whole world out there beyond the neoclassical paradigm, and when you buy into that paradigm, you concede a lot of ground to your political opponents.
RR, Darryl: Read This little snippet from Dean Baker about our overvalued currency and its effects
It’s only a couple of paragraphs.
“Sure, our government can make more “paper” but not without destroying our own savings along with the Chinese’s.”
The federal reserve has expanded its balance sheet from around $700billion to almost $2 TRILLION. This is what is commonly understood as “printing money” by increasing banking reserves…you know, the standard multiplier theory of money creation.
So tell me, where is the inflation?
@53 As a matter of fact, an old friend of mine worked for the State Department, and part of his job was doing just that–a little like the Robert Redford character in Three Days of the Condor, gleaning tidbits out of Russian newspapers and magazines. He came to love the…well, rather earthy humor in Russian publications, like the editorial in Pravda that accused Jimmy Carter of “beating pears with his schlong”. Later, he served as an interpreter on one of Reagan’s state visits to Moscow.
Our military spending operates much like a Soviet style command economy.
It surprises me that many of the self styled free marketeers that comment here are so in favor of it.
Maybe they have those expansive Emersonian minds that can hold diametrically opposed concepts and believe each one fervently.
Or — they’re idiots.
The reason that I suggested cutting back the number of carriers and subs is a matter of projection of power. Nobody else can do like we can. The Russian navy is junk, and the Chinese navy, while growing (IIRC, the vagabond Russian carrier hull Varyag is now in Chinese hands), is nowhere near the capacity to be more than a regional player. We could keep three carrier battle groups in the Pacific, one in the Atlantic and two in the Southern Ocean just fine and mothball the remaining four active carriers for later use if necessary.
And just to placate Roger, let’s say we keep four Tridents around, and rotate them to keep one in the North Atlantic and one in the North Pacific at all times. But get rid of those stupid fucking sub escorts going up and down the Straits that are nothing but a waste of taxpayer money.
And a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal to just a few hundred warheads would indicate to the world a more mature position, that it’s time to leave behind the relics of the Cold War once and for all, and to focus on 21st Century methods to solve 21st Century problems.
@62
While I understand where you are coming from, I dont think you thought through the numbers of capital ships very well.
There area always at least 1 or 2 carriers out of service – either going through re-fueling or modernization/servicing. same goes for the subs.
the advantage with the subs is that NOBODY can do anything against them. that alone makes them worth the expense.
I agree that we need to pull back from most of the bases – but I also agree that we need to take a more decisive stance in some areas
Example? Somali Pirates…I mean really, Pirates? And we(the world in general) just let them get away with this shit.
There should be no quarter EVER given to pirates…if it takes running the tankers and cargo ships in convoys, then so be it…but somebody needs to sweep the seas clean of these assholes – for good. These stupid stone-age, Khat-chewing fucks needs to put back in their place.
Fair enough point on refueling/servicing, but still, reducing our carrier fleet from 10 to 6 would still give us about as many carrier decks as the rest of the world combined.
UPDATE: Okay, it’s actually 11 carriers in active service, with Enterprise (CVN-65) to be retired no later than 2015. The first of the new Gerald R. Ford-class carriers (CVN-78) will replace Enterprise, and two more Ford-class carriers are planned for construction in the next 10 years or so.
There are eight other carriers in service around the world, most being of the through-deck STOVL class. Here’s a breakdown of current and future ships:
Brazil: 1 carrier in service.
France: 1 carrier in service, 1 possibly to be built.
India: 1 STOVL carrier in service, 1 (possibly 2) full-size carriers under construction.
Italy: 2 STOVL carriers in service.
Russia: 1 STOVL carrier in service, beginning construction of as many as 6 full-size carriers, though not expected to reach full deployment until at least 2050.
Spain: 1 STOVL carrier and 1 LHD (Landing Helicopter Deck, similar to USN Wasp-class) in service.
Thailand (yes, Thailand): 1 STOVL carrier in service – sort of. HTMS Chakri Naruebet, often referred to as “Thai-tanic”. I’m not making that up.
United Kingdom: 1 STOVL carrier in service, 2 full-size carriers under construction.
And last but not least, China. They have the STOVL carrier Varyag, which they purchased from Russia, under the original condition that it be used for nonmilitary usage, which they promptly reneged on. A conventioanlly-powered full-size carrier may be ready to sail by 2014, and a nuclear-powered one by 2020, but according to the World Policy Institue’s report on the matter, it may be decades before the PLA Navy builds the infrastructures of facilities and personnel necessary to effectively operate carriers.
So, nobody will have more than 6, and that’s 40 years from now. Meanwhile, we could have as many as 12 or 13 within a decade. That’s why I think we could significantly reduce our carrier fleet without risking national security. Maybe we can start by dropping to 8 carriers, then think about retiring another two later.