The best offense is not cutting defense

Finally, a poster who realizes some of the consequences of a broad defense cut. This is something that Stephen Walt, for all his intelligence, doesn't seem to grasp.

Obama is not proposing a cut.

I trust you will post a correction.

Assuming it was actually a defense cut (it isn't, as wolfboy noted) it still should happen. Defense spending is an extremely inefficient way to generate jobs, so the economic stimulus value is minimal. Most of the major procurement programs are oriented toward buying weapons we simply don't need, the technological spillover from defense research is much less than in the past (it frequently goes the other way, these days), and there is little long-term return on the investment. The same money put into infrastructure, education, or healthcare would yield far more economic return, and would have the added advantage of actually addressing a need.

As for frightening our allies, give me a break. We spend about as much on defense as every other state combined. If they are so terrified by the US delaying buying weapons that we really don't need, they can step up their own military spending and reap all those stimulus benefits you seem to think will result.

Finally, our enemies. Most of them may as well be armed with sticks and rocks given our military superiority. We face no real conventional threats for the next couple of decades, and the spending that is being cut will not meaningfully protect us from WMDs or terrorism.

There are really no good reasons not to cut much of the current procurement budget.

Take the F-22, for example. We need it because the F-16s and F-15s that are supposed to guarantee American military superiority for "decades to come" are more than 20 years old, and aging quickly. Several Russian fighters, such as the latest Sukhois, can go head-to-head with those fighters - and those can be sold worldwide.

Bret, we've discussed this before and come to no agreement.

Why do you assume that we will continue for any length of time to find high-performance warplanes affordable?

Why do you assume that they can be cost-effective in a military theater where we can expect fuel limitations to be increasingly important?

It isn't worth continuing the F-22 if it will be useful for another 5 years. You're projecting at least another 20 years for them, aren't you? How can you possibly have the chutzpah, the hubris, to think you can look 20 years ahead at the evolution of military strategy given the continuing changes in technology, resources, finance, and possibly climate?

It's possible that the F-22 (and the aircraft carrier) might continue to be worth its maintenance more than 5 years ahead. But how can you possibly be so confident that it will happen that you'd bet the large sums of money required?

As I mentioned on Dr.Walt's blog, the Chinese have been doing research into submarines (which would allow them to interdict US carrier groups in Southeast Asian seas), cyber-warfare, and ASAT (since the US military is heavily dependent on our network of satellites for everything from targeting bombs to communications).

Yes. It's absurd that we depend on a satellite network that we can't rebuild as fast as any combination of enemies can remove it. We need to think of it as a convenience that we can't depend on, and concentrate on practicing war-fighting without it.

I find it heartening that the chinese are focusing a lot of their thought on how to keep our carriers away. Those submarines aren't good for much else. The way I see it, they're playin Go and not Texas H*ldem. They don't want a nuclear war. They don't even want to invade taiwan and shell the whole place while they capture it. They want a negotiated settlement, where taiwan comes back to them willingly and the USA doesn't object.

So can we protect our carriers from the best the chinese can do? I don't think anybody knows, but anecdotal evidence suggests no.

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=94929
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002969.html

So if it's true that our surface ships are not defensible, we lose a whole lot of ability to project power. But that doesn't give somebody else the ability to project power. China becomes a strong regional power and so do we. It isn't the end of the world.

"You're projecting at least another 20 years for them, aren't you? How can you possibly have the chutzpah, the hubris, to think you can look 20 years ahead at the evolution of military strategy given the continuing changes in technology, resources, finance, and possibly climate?"

It's a best-guess estimate on how things will turn out. Obviously, Technology X could come around and make this all irrelevant (one possible variant of this, at least from what I've heard, would be if compact, solid-state lasers became possible and cost-effective).

I say we desperately need to speed up our development cycle. The current military hardware-upgrade cycle is just plain too slow.

Speeding things up would probably involve, in part, robot assembly lines that could be reprogrammed fairly quickly, and design systems that are themselves designed to fit the limitations of the assembly lines.

Simplify the designs themselves, and aim for a one-month turnaround between submitting a design and getting a prototype that fits the design.

If we can get a quick enough design cycle we won't have to argue about what we'll need 20 years from now. We can build it and test it and put it into production sooner.

"We need to think of [satellite communication] as a convenience that we can't depend on, and concentrate on practicing war-fighting without it."

That's probably impossible, seeing as most of our communication network depends on it (along with bomb targeting in many cases, although that's not as vitally dependent on the satellites).

We didn't have any satellites at all until 1957. Every military in the world got by without them until just recently, in living memory.

Find ways to do adequate communication without them. Or find ways to fight your wars without that communication.

Or be ready to put up new satellites faster than the enemies can shoot them down, keep them immune from cyber attacks, and oh yes have enough ready to launch and enough launchers that the enemies run out of weapons to attack them faster than you run out of new satellites.

Lots of the world's militaries get by without any satellite communication at all. Why is it impossible for us?

We didn't have any satellites at all until 1957. Every military in the world got by without them until just recently, in living memory.

Yes, but that was when radio was the main form of communication, and you didn't have thinks like global command-and-control electronic networks beyond the above. Working without satellites would be seriously going back down to a much more basic level - I question whether you could actually run one of the military's worldwide networks that way.

Or be ready to put up new satellites faster than the enemies can shoot them down, keep them immune from cyber attacks, and oh yes have enough ready to launch and enough launchers that the enemies run out of weapons to attack them faster than you run out of new satellites.

I don't think it is as difficult as you are portraying it.