Forum Post: On the military

I've seen a lot of posts on here talking about how war is murder and how we need to immediately stand down and/or recall all of our troops and pretty much wipe out the defense budget. Further, many of these people seem to believe that pretty much every war we've gotten into since 1945 was hopelessly misguided at best and murderous imperialism at its worst. The other argument I hear is that we should focus on ourselves first and suspend all overseas activity until America has its own house in order. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think it's that simple.

America should do all the good that it has the power to do, both in a domestic and a foreign sense. Not all wars are as illegitimate as Iraq or Vietnam, and not all necessary overseas actions (such as nabbing Kony and dropping him off in the Hague) need to be handled with all-out war. Our foreign policy needs to be smart and efficient (most good done with the least risk to our troops and foreign civilians), but should not be completely isolationist.

I'm not going to disagree about Vietnam; that was a major blunder on the part of Eisenhower (when he decided that backing a French colonial government was a good idea) and Kennedy and LBJ (for not realizing what was going on and backing us out of there). I would much prefer that we'd been able to settle our affairs in Afghanistan and leave already, and Iraq never should have happened.

Korea, I do disagree on. Given the modern-day difference between North and South Korea I would argue that the results of the action we took there were worth the cost. I also feel like the ICC needs a warrant enforcement mechanism of its own (because otherwise it's usually us getting involved). However, sending a few people in to deal with Joseph Kony is the right thing to do. Sending the military into Darfur with orders to clean up on the Janjaweed and extradite Omar al-Bashir would have been the right thing to do.

You can't simply disallow all conflicts on the grounds that they're ugly. Sometimes we as a nation have to do ugly things because the alternative is worse. Before you ask, I would be more than willing to go to war if asked to; my greatest fear isn't dying (if it's for the right reasons) but to have hung back in a a situation when my interference could have saved someone.

War isn't something we should enter into lightly, and quite honestly Iraq was a PR stunt based on a lie. That said, I also feel like we need to move to a different way of handling our military; perhaps two years of mandated public (including in the military) or community service after high school would be a good idea. That would (in my mind) cut down on unnecessary warfare, given that there would be no exemptions and especially if children of public officials and defense contractors would be on the front lines of any military action we go into; authorizing and/or powering a war becomes a much tougher decision when doing so will point your child at the business end of someone else's AK-47.

Also, you could probably take a pretty good chunk out of our defense budget without dismissing or recalling a single soldier or reducing our combat readiness one iota. This is mostly due to all sorts of contracts that are late and over budget, or simply more expensive than training and maintaining your own people. If you look at the Lockheed Martin fighter jet flap it probably would have been cheaper to train a team of engineers and build the prototyping equipment they'd need. If we take government-subsidized private firms and consolidating those operations in-house, we have a start right there; if we stop giving crazy tax breaks for companies doing military R&D and moved those operations back in-house the cost of funding the labs and paying the people would probably be less than the lost revenue. The same goes for mercenary firms like Blackwater; we already have trained, disciplined soldiers capable of providing security; why should we pay a private firm to provide less qualified people at a net loss to the taxpayer?