Sunday, November 18, 2012
Somebody wrote a report
It seems that a bunch of retired military and defense experts got together to come up with some ideas to reduce defense spending without any reduction in perceived security. They put together a list of good and not so good ideas. They seem to be wedded to the idea that the US should be the world's Imperial police but within that framework they came up with one good idea.
A new report by a task force made up of former military officers and defense experts says it is possible, even with smaller budgets, to improve U.S. military capabilities — but a key to this is avoiding prolonged ground wars.And if they didn't buy the idea of world police, we could avoid all those useless wars.
There are several key changes required to make this possible, including reducing the size of nuclear forces, reforming both compensation and deployment policies for military personnel, and making a priority of funding research into basic advancements in military capabilities rather than rushing to build every proposed new weapon, according to the report released Friday by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Stimson Center.
To do more with less, the U.S. also needs to “strongly resist being drawn into protracted land wars” and restrict ground combat deployments “to well-defined and limited objectives,” says the report, A New U.S. Defense Strategy for a New Era.
“U.S. leaders should think long and hard before committing U.S. ground forces to contingencies that might lead to lengthy commitments of sizable scale, particularly when the goal is to stabilize failing states or to unseat despotic rulers,” the report says. “At a minimum, the U.S. should only participate in such interventions when they have the active support of friendly states with a clear stake in the situation, such as neighbors of the troubled nation.”
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