Woot! America's Navy #1 !

[Drake Tungsten]

Isn't winning wars overseas (ie. not in your own territory) the best possible outcome?

[Jon Miller]

as everyone who has palyed civ knows

if you make a large army, you either need to use it, or threaten with it to make your competitors spend the same (or more) resources on their armies

so the two winning points are:
1. if you have a hugely dominant army, and can easily browbeat others to do your bidding...
2. if you have a decent army, and it forces others to spend a lot (as much as you?) on theirs, but none gets used (you need a better economy, or to force them to spend more then you to make this worth while)

during the cold war we did 2.

we are currently trying to do 1., while I admit that our army is very dominant, it can't force people to do our bidding all that well, so I think that we are failing right now

Jon Miller

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten


Isn't winning wars overseas (ie. not in your own territory) the best possible outcome?

'

No. The best outcome is not getting involved in them in the first place which is usually easy to do if you are far away.

An assumption seems to exist that all lessons should be drawn from world wars I and II even though the behavior of the great powers has changed substantially since then. There is no reason that regional wars should have to spiral into world wars anymore because the unique circumstances that made such stupidity occur have long since disappeared.

Since there isn't a large hostile major power to the US it's the perfect time to drastically downsize our military as it's extra size no longer serves to further guarentee our territorial integrity.

[Drake Tungsten]

Yeah, we can see how well a downsized army is doing in Iraq.

I bet a downsized navy would perform similarly well if China ever decides to attack Taiwan.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Yeah, we can see how well a downsized military is doing in Iraq.

Iraq is a poster child for abandoning reliance on a vast expensive military to pursue vast expensive foreign adventures which in turn pursue vaguely defined global geopolitical agendas. The direct cost of the whole action and the earlier necessary cost of the means to pursue it obviously vastly exceed whatever benefit we might imagine accrues from pursuing such geopolitical agendas.

For the cost of all that military hardware we could probably have established all manner of infrastructure to totally erase our dependence on imported oil. What the hell else is in iraq or the whole middle east that would possibly be of value to our economic well being?

Furthermore from a purely ethical standpoint, our military should never have switched from being the guardian of our political freedom to being the guardian of favorable overseas economic interests. Essentially all of our post cold war military adventures have been about that second objective.

As to your edit about Taiwan. Who cares? If taiwan is in danger they should spend gobs of cash to protect themselves. that's the way it works. They should also obviously pursue defensive alliances but our current 'alliance' in no way commits us to commiting to war with china if china decides force will reunite taiwan and the mainland. We need to limit our alliances to countries that by and large can mainly defend themselves or who belong to large enough military alliances that no single member has to be a superpower to guarentee effective defense against any hypothetical aggressor. Otherwise such alliances are obviously contrary to our vital interests.

[Saras]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc


However, just like the Brits during it's Empire days, the US is paying a heavy economic price for it's meddling.

The Brits paid perhaps twice less as % of GDP at its zenith of imperial might (second half of XIX century).

[Az]

Saras : That's an amazing statistic dude! Considering the fact that they actually RULED these places.

Hmm -- are you seriously suggesting there is an "unfriendly" airforce out there with a reasonable chance of going at it with the US navy carrier group at a distance where they need to get a tanker assist? My bet would be on the Yanks.

No, no, of course not. But this is the paradox:

If there is such a force, it is threatening to US NAVY carriers.
If there is no such force, these carriers aren't really needed.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Az
Saras : That's an amazing statistic dude! Considering the fact that they actually RULED these places.

Hmm -- are you seriously suggesting there is an "unfriendly" airforce out there with a reasonable chance of going at it with the US navy carrier group at a distance where they need to get a tanker assist? My bet would be on the Yanks.

No, no, of course not. But this is the paradox:

If there is such a force, it is threatening to US NAVY carriers.
If there is no such force, these carriers aren't really needed.

Right these carriers are enormous boondoggles not because they are obsolete or don't work but because the job they are built to perform doesn't really need to be done.

When I look at the sheer vast infrastructure that these things are and how uttlerly useless they are to accomplishing anything most people care about it's incredibly sad.

We could have built the superconducting supercollider for less than the cost of just one of these things but we axed the collider. To this day no collider approaching it's capabilities has been built and what have the carriers gotten us in that time? Just a gulf war 1 whose entire legacy of reassertion of UN supremecy in containing aggression was subsequently erased by a gulf war 2.

[Az]

Oh, I wouldn't blame this: You could've had both, if not the tax cuts for the super-rich.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Az
Oh, I wouldn't blame this: You could've had both, if not the tax cuts for the super-rich.

Maybe, but I'm not sure that extra carriers and full science funding is better than full science funding with tax cuts for the super-rich.

About the only tax cut for the super rich I oppose is the cutting of the death tax ('estate tax'). I certainly don't see the need for the estate taxes to have been cut.

[Chemical Ollie]

Re: Woot! America's Navy #1 !

Originally posted by Lonestar

Man, how sad is it when the US has Double the carriers as the rest of the world combined?

Man, how sad is it that US waste more tax money on excessive stuff than the rest of the world combined?

EDIT: Oops, I see some others already pointed that out...

[Ted Striker]

Alot of good points in here by Shawn, Geronimo, and Jon Miller.

I liked Jon's example. In Civ games, if you aren't the aggressor, you only build large armies for defense, to counter another large army.

There is no other large army anymore.

That many carriers is a waste of money in today's world. No offense to guys like Lonestar who are out doing their jobs.

But our large military needs to be restructured. Scaling back the carrier fleet by a couple of carriers is a good step. There's not only the capital expenditure, but the maintenance costs are unbelievable.

[Dis]

Originally posted by snoopy369
I'm shocked by the fact that China is supposedly building a carrier ... why the f* would they want to do that? Japan and Taiwan/ROC are well within land attack range ... and we're the only nation they'd ever realistically want to fight that a carrier would help them against- and at the moment the concept of that happening is just too funny. They'd be better off with SSMs given our naval abilities ... and India would probably be too hard to get to and too dangerous of waters to risk, given they can use Tibet (unless India gets frisky and takes it away first) ...

not likely. India wasn't too impressive in their war with China in 62.

[Dis]

Originally posted by BlackCat


Just out of curiosity - why do US keep their carriers ? My guess is that they could easilier and cheaper protect themselves without.

*cough*recent (2001) war in Afghanistan*cough*

[Dis]

Originally posted by Sava
of course, why spend money educating our youth, giving health care to our people, or god forbid helping the poor when we can build tons of floating useless rust buckets manned by rednecks

Hey! I was not a redneck. My neck has never been red in my life.