Featured Reducing the scale of the military pt 2

A future adventurist Chinese premier decides to extend Chinese hegemony to India, the Philippines, Japan, perhaps Australia. Are you saying "we're not going there"? I'd say we'd better, for the good of the free world.

That's all good and fine for them invading us. No one has ever dared invade us. But we've often found it necessary to go to a spot in the world in which the rights and freedoms of a free people are threatened, and if that scenario above doesn't warrant our assisting those nations, what would?

We may have to go to North Korea to disarm them. They have a fanatical, mentally unbalanced progeny of inbreeding in charge. We have no idea what he is capable of, but developing nuclear weapons and having the desire to use them is well within the possibilities.

Again, we'd have to go there, and it our 45 million going up against their 100 million. I don't think we can put that number in the field, nor half of that number, nor likely even a quarter, nor even an eighth. We'd better hope technology wins out if that scenario arises.

You keep saying that. That's not what's going to happen.

 

China has a very large Achilles Heel, it is the Three Gorges Dam. Surely they know this and it would temper any plans that might set off a war.

 

It takes 7 support personnel for every 1 combat arms. Having a 450,000 man Army means that we will have 56,250 fighters on the ground. That doesn't sound very good to me personally.

On the issue of spending, IMO, to cut government spending, we need to increase the size of the Army. We have so many jobs getting outsourced to civilians that the Army could handle itself, and for cheaper. For one, training on different new technologies. Why pay a civilians over a hundred grand a year to teach people how to fly a small UAV in theatre, when another soldier could teach them? Why pay civilians that much to stay in theatre and fix our vehicles when they get blown up when the Army could learn to do so? There are so many areas in which the DoD contracts civilians when they could have the military do these things a lot cheaper. We could save literally billions a year by growing the Army, and cutting our dependence on civilian contractors. The initial cost would be greater, due to training costs. But the savings in the long run would be immense.

To offset the training costs, we could raise the minimum contract length from 3 years to 4, and lengthen the time spent in the inactive ready reserve from 8 to 10 years. Also, to offset the cost of training in a time of war, we could pull from the inactive ready reserve quicker than we do today.