Aircraft Carriers - What is their future?

[Dill]

(07-24-2017, 02:00 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: There is no reason we need 35,000 people in Germany. I am talking we put skeleton crews on two air bases, and pull out of the rest of the bases. You don't need 35,000 people to make sure runways are maintained and housing is mothballed, while keeping out squatters or anything. 1,000 or 2,000 people tops.

If there's another crisis in Eastern Europe or North Africa, then Europe or Africa can handle it. We don't need to be the world's police. It is time for other people to step up. Once we remove the majority of our fources from protecting other people's nations, then they will be forced to start spending enough to defend themselves, thus having the capability of solving a crisis on their own in the future.

We're giving people fish. They need to be left to learn how to fish themselves.

$20t in debt says and old infrastructure says we have our own problems to solve right here in our country.

Sorry I am late responding to this.  I am not an expert on military logistics.  B-Zona could probably give us a better idea of what might be required to keep bases in Germany.  I don't think skeleton crews will do it, though. Something tells me the the Chiefs of Staff would balk at 1,000-2,000 people tops.  They know what it takes to move men and material quickly through the air, and in sufficient quantities.  The US military may need to do more than just land on those bases.

The real crux of our difference is how we imagine what happens when the US pulls back from world policing and "other people step up."  They will perhaps have the ability to police their own crises. But they will also have the ability to create crises, and to control trade routes and airspace as they wish.

There are some state actors in the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East who would not view a vacuum of US power as a chance to help keep order. Rather they would see it as an opportunity to assert regional hegemony, as Saudi Arabia now appears to be doing.

The next difference between us is how we imagine regional conflicts elsewhere might affect the US.  Most people who espouse your position think such conflicts would affect us very little or not at all. People who have lived with the benefits of "world policing" for so long now imagine them (if they imagine them at all) to result from a "natural" international order which will continue on as before if the US withdraws.  I think such conflicts would greatly affect world trade, and would have a chance to balloon and link up with other conflicts, as happened in the period just before WWII, when the US was caught unprepared and had to catch up, paying a great price for two decades of isolationism.

This time around, it is unlikely the US will ever get back the power and influence it is giving up now, short of winning another world war. But how could anyone do that with nukes on the table?

The 20T debt you refer to is as much a result of tax cuts as military spending; though I grant a chunk of that results from bad foreign policy decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The restriction of the US economy which would follow isolationist policies would not help us pay off that debt. And likely we would have to increase it--or raise taxes on the rich as we did in WWII--when forced to intervene in world affairs again.