The defense black hole

Ordinary Freddie:

We’ve all seen the numbers; to say that the military of the United States dwarfs that of any other nation would be an extreme understatement. That advantage is not just paper power but translates into an enormous real-world advantage in fighting conventional wars. What’s more, in the most strategically important fields of conventional military conflict that face us, naval and air power, we are not only unmatched, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which our dominance could fade in the next three or four or five decades. Our advantage is just that big. You see this portrayed in various thought experiments of dubious worth– we could defeat any other air force even if we restricted ourselves to using ten year old technology, we could defeat any individual navy in the world using only our submarines, our navy could defeat the combined naval forces of every other nation on earth, etc. Dubious or not, the point is clear; we enjoy in the United States an advantage in military technology that is so vast, we could reasonably cut our military budget by 3% or 4% or 5%, save billions of dollars, and still remain effectively untouchable both in carrying out our own defense and the defense of our allies.

We’ve also all seen, in recent years, what looks like previously unheard of (post-Vietnam, anyway) vulnerabilities for our military apparatus, in the our continuing struggles within Iraq and Afghanistan. But while the setbacks have been real, they have also been of a particular kind, the failure to easily or effectively implement counterinsurgency. This quite likely has a lot less to do with the nature of the United States and its military than it has to do with the nature of counterinsurgency. As you’ve read before, counterinsurgency is hard. It has little to do with a given country’s military power and can’t be fixed by the application of more dollars or more technology.

I believe we could shoot for more than a 10% cut and still be nigh as untouchable.

Throwing more money at counterinsurgency is like throwing more money at education. We're well past the point of diminishing returns; the solution is to change the rules of the game: Avoid nation-building hellholes like Iraq and Af-Pak: just neutralize actual threats then GTFO. If anything, invest in better intelligence-gathering.

Yet the right fearmongers ever on. Absent the threat of the Soviet Union, it's still all they know.