Aircraft Carriers - What is their future?

[Dill]

(07-24-2017, 09:32 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: They sent 5,000 troops to Afghanistan to help us fight a not-war. We have 35,000-50,000 troops stationed IN GERMANY (the numbers on it vary a lot).

You could easily turn that into just a couple hundred who are responsible for maintaining and defending a few airfields in case we ever need them in the future, and nothing bad would happen. We would save a ton of money, though.

There was fighting every day when I was in Afghanistan in 2011. People dying. I'm pretty sure it was a war.

No harm in reducing the US "footprint" in Europe, but I wouldn't want to go much further. 35,000 in Germany sounds sustainable to me.

If the US wants two effective air bases in Germany, that will require more than a couple hundred on the ground. Ramstein is a very large base. And right by it is the US hospital at Landstuhl, which was very important during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

And the US needs at least two, in case there is some future crisis in Eastern Europe or North Africa requiring UN/NATO intervention, as did Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya.

People's views on this tend to turn on whether they think a power vaccum in Europe makes much difference to the world, and to the US.