Originally Posted by
SonicFlyer
I have no problem serving if called up to defend my country. However the vast majority of what the US military gets used for is not actually defending the country. It's pushing big interests foreign political agendas. And it's a disservice to the troops.
Two separate issues.
First issue, National security: Can be accomplished for well less than 30% of the current budget with a robust strategic deterrent force, a coast guard, and an air national guard. We live behind the two largest moats in military history, they can't come get us with land forces. Totally abdicate the global cop role, nullify all alliances and defense treaties.
Europe would fall to the new Russian Putinic Empire (established just last week), Asia to the People's Democratic Empire of China (Alaska would revert to Russia, Hawaii to China).
Downside: we now live in a world where the global economic shots are called by others, except for what we can manage in our isolationist economy (it would be a large isolationist economy). Eventually they might team up and try to move in from the north and south, although that's a very difficult logistics proposition.
Second Issue, Global Cop: We fell into that role after WW-2.
Abdicating that would leave a power vacuum (any marginal student of history can tell you what happens next), our current force structure prevents that by it's very existence. Politicians may on occasion utilize that force structure for their own opportunistic purposes, but that does not invalidate the fundamental benefit of that force structure or the reason we kept funding it over many decades.
It also provides a very powerful leveraged benefit... with enough confidence in OUR capabilities and intentions, many other nations will line up on the side of democratic values. Without confidence in us, many of those nations would have to make deals with the devil.
If doing it for the general good isn't enough for you, any reasonable calculation shows that we gain far more in economic value from the free world than we spend on defense/global cop. I satisfied myself of that long ago.
And don't go talking about "can't we all just get along". That might be possible on an individual human level, but it's absolutely not possible when you're talking autocratic regimes run by sociopathic tyrants. History is batting 100% on THAT.