Ag_SGT said:
Gbr1971 said:
If this is going to be our new foreign policy and I'm not saying it's a bad idea, why do we need to spend 700B on the military?
We certainly won't need as many soldiers, and sailors. As much as we've been spending maybe we can save 300 or 400 billion by cutting the pentagon budget.
If you think the Middle East is our main focus then I would agree with you but Trump and his team were smart to listen to military advisors. Those Middle Eastern countries can't project their power for anything other than isolated attacks on our homeland thru acts of terror.
Good post.
Correct on the above. And even to the degree they can, its largely due to the excessive `open door' tendency of the prior administrations here and in Europe like Merkel importing known non-assimilates and silly things like the FBI not vetting obvious bad apples and dealing with them. In any case the Middle Eastern ones are clearly in a reform stage now, and becoming reasonable.
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Our focus has shifted to equipping and training our military to return to large scale all out combat in a multi domain operation (MDO) against near peer countries. No ME country can come close to matching our force across all domains, but there are two countries that can, Russia and China. The military thinks that much like the collapse of the USSR, Russia is spending so much they project Russia to collapse in the next decade or so but the long term threat is China.
Even if true, its not necessarily desirable. Russia is not communist and with some creative diplomacy might even be brought to our side of the face-off coming, as is likely, as you describe here>>
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In a war today, the only real advantage we have over China is experience in fighting, but they have us beat hands down when it comes to technology, hardware and in the cyber realm. Our entire fighting force has to transition from fighting these small battles thru out the ME in pretty much one or two domains and to being able to fight in all domains, air, sea, land, cyber etc. To do that it requires a lot of money and the need is there because unlike Iraq or Afghanistan they can project their forces across all domains and across the world.
You left out a big one, and maybe the decisive one. Aside from all that, they have mass body numbers and full control of media that they can get away with absolutely massive losses of life without being forced to sue for peace. We can't match that. In fact, with today's media, we can't even really engage in a long campaign anything like the Japanese vs Chinese around Shanghai just in 1937. We would have to try to win by technical and economic means while exercising enough draconian clamp down along more Cold War lines to prevent 5th column activity. Universities would have to be cleaned out for example.
FrioAg 00:
Leftist Democrats "have completely overplayed the Racism accusation. Honestly my first reaction when I hear it today is to assume bad intentions by the accuser, not the accused."
