Pact to cut US-Russia nukes; signing in 2 weeks - Yahoo! News You have to wonder if he is going to down size the military? I mean after all of his social spending to build a new great society. I was thinking the other day that our nukes could turn out to be the only thing we have left. How will we afford to protect ourselves? How will we protect ourselves? Other countries should be worried also. We can no longer afford to protect them either.
Ehh, the Marines haven't needed nukes for 234 years and won't in the future. I think we've done a pretty good job of protecting this country. :thumb:
I wouldn't get wrapped up in numbers of nukes. There's been a lot of progress in this field. The administration is not likely to mandate a smaller military, either. But they are surely going to gut the budget (are already gutting the budget). And since you can't close a base without Congressional approval, and so you can't close units (because bases need a reason for being), and Congressmen get elected by people who benefit from basing strategies, I doubt we see many more rounds of base closure in the near future. We've slashed A TON in the last two decades. But the cuts have to come from somewhere. So standby for another Clintonesque procurement holiday. And standby for claims that technology will allow us to kill cheaper and from longer distances. It's the next step. Guaranteed. Watch, for instance, how delayed the F-35 will be and how deep the cuts in the program will be. And there will be many, many more. At least for three more years. What that means is - very old equipment, very low reliability rates, very poor supply/logistics response times. If the Chinese can hang on to their economic growth (which is not automatic), America's military risks becoming second class by default. The only thing we'll have to compete with (much like during the Cold War) is our superior training at the lower echelons.
Another lesson from a guy who worked in Naval Intelligence for 15 years, 8 of which were within the beltway, in the very very murky world of resource management. 1. We need about 20 nukes for MAD (mutually assured destruction). We have many times that many. The Russians need about the same. They have a lot more than many times that. I will gladly risk not having enough vs having too many to control 100%...which is really the deal here. We have to be certain that deep in the bowels of the former Soviet Union, every one of theirs is controlled as it is supposed to be. The fewer to control, the more chance of having a 100% success rate. 2. Unfortunately, the Pentagon is still, to some degree fighting the cold war. There are several components to the DoD Budget. Manpower and "Other Procurement" are being focused on asymetrical warfare and not the grand soviet invasion. The F-22 is 100% focussed on Soviet, make that Russia, and the F-35 is not much better. Check out Military.Com. There is an article about USN and USAF both pushing for a prop fighter to use in LIC air support as opposed to using the multi million dollar jets of today. The point: There ARE HUGE dollars in the DoD budget that can be either reduced, cut, or reallocated to support the mission of the next 20 years. Yeah, we might have to go head to head with CHINA in the future, but we will not use today's weapons to do so. They will be obsolete by the time that conflict comes around, heaven forbid it does. 3. Regrettably, the big force behind a lot of the weapons procurement, especially the big ticket items are our friends in the CONGRESS. Many of the huge dollar figures are neither needed or wanted by the Pentagon, but are forced upon them by the CONGRESS in order to get jobs in and money for their district. Occasionally the services and the Congress are in synch on this, both want the weapon, but you might be surprised how often they are not. Of course, the services openly support such nonsense since if they don't they have made an enemy in the Congress and that is bad JuJu. To summarize: If one is looking for defense cuts, the number of nukes is a GREAT place to look. Not only does this make us MORE SECURE, by reducing the number of "mistakes" that might happen, but it frees up money for cuts, reductions, or re-distributions. hwr
Everyone agree that the world will be a better place with fewer special weapons and fewer players in the nuclear business. In a world where numbers of warheads are much smaller and nobody has more than we do, the advantage goes to the technologically superior side, which we remain. We lose nothing strategically here, especially since both sides possess a lot of obsolete models that would have had to have been replaced soon at great cost without this. We lose nothing tactically because nuclear weapons have proven to be of no use on the battlefield. It would just be a trigger for a strategic war. Obama won't be cutting any military capability. But he must continue the process of evolution from the Cold War model to the 21st century model and certain items must go. Nuclear weapons are a huge dangerous expense for something unlikely to be used. Our navy has shrunken to dangerously small levels for a global power when the globe has not shrunken. The money could be better spent. We need fewer bases in the US. We are unlikely to ever need to train 90 heavy divisions again as we did in WWII. That money could be spent on improving transport and logistics for the kind of small, mobile and violent combat brigades and special Ops units that we are more likely to need in the next decade. We have to cut loose some obsolete technology. The B-1 bomber was designed for a mission that doesn't exist anymore. It's expensive to maintain, has the lowest readiness percentage of any plane in the air force, and has contributed damn little throughout it's undistinguished career. The money can be spent on robotic aircraft which are highly useful and cheap. We can't build them fast enough.
That money could also be spent on updating/maintaining/fixing up our main bases that are falling apart. When I was at The Basic School back in '05 in Quantico, Va (Basic Officer Course for the Marines), about a quarter of the officer barracks rooms were condemned due to asbestos and ceiling tiles were constantly falling in the classrooms. Hell, even in our own squadron right now it takes 2 months just to get a damn light fixture replaced. There are definitely better ways to be spending our defense dollars in that regard.
I learned to drink alcohol at TBS in the summer of 1972..Beers and Boones Farm. Not necessarily in that order.
And so it begins. Check the accident rates. "Robotic" aircraft have very narrow and limited utility and are not advancing nearly as quickly or as well as the rhetoric.
