Well, do you?

The cuts, most of them, are designed to place us in the same position we were in the 1930’s.

In 20 years, what we will have, compared with our enemy, is the equivalent of the Mark 13 torpedo at the beginning of WWII.

So, no, I don’t like them. They will lead to war.

They prefer instead to believe that our enemies don’t really want to attack us, and therefore they won’t attack us.

Few, if any, of our leaders ever understand that sustaining peace requires preparing for war. The Japanese were negotiating with us right up until the moment they stopped, and the attack on Pearl Harbor began. We wanted to believe the Japanese, so we did. The Japanese had us outnumbered and mismatched from the start. The Japanese knew they could not win a long war but they believed their numerical superiority would achieve victory quickly. Had we been prepared for war, with say 8 carrier groups in the pacific, Pearl would not have been attacked, the Japanese would not have gone to war with us.

The same is true of Germany. Had the west been prepared the war would not have started.

The Kumbaya crowd will get you killed every 25 - 50 years or so.

The cost of sustaining peace is military hardware, men, and training. The cost of ignoring this is much higher.

BTW -

It is typical fantasy that we will only end up fighting the sort of war we prepare for.

Just as it is typical reality that we end up actually fighting a war that we have not prepared for, when we are (inevitably) attacked.

China’s a bit of a different read, but I’m not convinced that “more and bigger of everything” is the proper route to counter them either. I’d be much happier with the development of drone combatants for anti-air use; sure, they might be less proficient individually, but if we can field fifty of them for every F-XX, and it’s just lobbing missiles over the horizon anyway… With that as an alternative, coming up with a new super-fighter is about as useful as designing a new heavy bomber with even more machine guns in 1960.

Sorry, Avatar, but you make my point for me.

Obama prefers not to wage war on China, Russia, or Iran, and so he is pretending that they have no likewise desire vis us, and hence, we have no need to make military preparations for such eventualities.

Hooey.

All three aspire to at least regional hegemony, and none of them have shown any squeamishness about spending blood or treasure to achieve them, as long as their calculations show such expenditures, on balance, would achieve their goals.

As I have said, we are planning for the wars we want to fight (ie, none) and not for the wars we may be forced to fight.

A quick examination of the last war we fought should help to clarify. We fought a second-world tank power, somewhat equivalent to a small, WWII USSR-style enemy, on ideal territory for tank battles, ie, desert. Yet it still took us months and months to gear up, because you fight tanks with tanks, and the M1A1 is 26 feet long, 11 wide, and weighs 70 tons. You need ships and roads and, most important, time to move those things around. At the moment our alternatives are air power and Airborne boots.

We need a stronger and faster combined arms strategy, one equipped to oppose either tanks or terrorists, depending on what is needed and what can be deployed.

F-22s or something like them are an integral part of any such strategy.

We need tank busters that aren’t an unwieldy as tanks, but are as effective as tanks in opposition to tanks.

We need new training and attack doctrine. We need to remember that the primary purpose of a military is waging war, not peace.

I think most of the COIN doctrine is horseshit. It is not our role to impose democracy on anybody, and it is especially not the miltary’s role to do so. That is the believe of the true neocon, who is a democratic imperialist, an alien concept to American history.

We need the military capability to oppose and, if necessay, defeat the military of our enemies, (in several different scenarios) and we need the balls to name those who are our enemies as such - and that would have to include China, Russia, and Iran, as well as a slew of their lesser allies like NorK, Syria, and the Palestinians.

Some of them are Islamist terrorists (all of whom are surrogates of various Islamist regimes), but not all of the regimes we might need to defeat are terrorists, or second world leftovers.

Right now, we’re not well set up to fight anybody.

Bill, you do realize that anything that weighed less than an Abrams would be directly trading some sort of combat capability, right? It’s not like the thing is a 50-ton tank with 20 tons of lead strapped to it. You want less armor, you’re directly reducing survivability (and the M1A2 is that in spades.)

However, you don’t actually fight tanks with tanks, right? You fight tanks with helicopters and ground attack aircraft, because they kill tanks easily and the tanks can’t shoot back worth a crap.

You need air superiority to employ helicopters and ground attack aircraft. But gaining air superiority isn’t about sending your interceptors out to fight their interceptors like this was some kind of rehash of the Battle of Britain. You’re using cruise missile assets in the initial wave to disable runways and destroy the enemy’s aircraft on the ground as much as possible, then following that up with direct air attacks on the bases to knock the enemy out of the air war, with specialist aircraft to work over the enemy’s ground-to-air defenses.

None of that requires manned aircraft at all - you’re going up against pre-planned targets you’ve had under satellite observation, or you’re engaging things with powerful radars (and we worked out the trick of identifying radars and using the radar signal as a homing beacon for a nice package of boom long ago.)

You don’t really need manned aircraft until you’ve got air superiority and you’re using ground attack aircraft to work over enemy armor and command structures, and most of that is because it’s a little easier to distinguish “column of soldiers in trucks” from “refugee convoy” if you’re in the airplane… and there’s no guarantee that sate of affairs will persist for long either. In many ways, it’s easier to be the GiB if the “back” is “back in Nevada”.

THAT is the sort of thing people are talking about when they talk about “fighting the last war”. We’ve made technological advances that make conventional fighter defense practically useless - which means we don’t need a conventional fighter OFFENSE to back it up. (And that’s assuming that the fighter-to-fighter role wouldn’t be better served by drones as well. So much of modern air combat is “missiles over the horizon” anyway…) So should we be busting the bank to build a next-gen fighter? No, no more than we should be building a huge Abrams successor to fight enemy Bolo-wannabes.

All that said, that isn’t a defense of Obama’s spending priorities. When I say “maybe we have better ways to spend money than the F-22 program”, I’m not thinking “gee, we could spend that money to improve welfare benefits” or “we need to bail out GM more”. If we’re thinking about moving to a drone- and missile-based offensive stance, there’s where the money should go…

Avatar, DCP, I’m not arguing one system or another. There is always a tradeoff. It is the tone of the cuts. And they are not done, there will be next years budget, and the following years. It is clear what the intention is. To cut, over time, the military budget to euroweenie levels.

The moment our enemies perceive we are weaker than they, they will strike. History proves this to be true. We do not live in some new world where wars are a thing of the past. We do live in a world where wars (real war, not conflict) are inhibited because of our overwhelming strength. When that is gone, the old world will return.