Quote:So you simultaneously agree with Ron Paul's position of complete non-interventionism while also being against reducing military presence in allied nations where there is no clear and present threat to the liberties of your countrymen due to "logistics"?
Nah, you miss the point...probably deliberately.
There is no point to maintaining troops in Germany or Japan except to provide the very necessary logistical support for our adventures elsewhere.
We have 35,000 troops in S. Korea who are backed by extensive air units in Japan ( including Okinawa.) You cannot simply say, we are at peace with Japan so bring them home because then those guys in Korea would be feeling awfully lonely if L'il Kim decided to cross the border. The North Korean regime is batshit crazy and we do not have a Peace Treaty in Korea - merely an armistice.
So while Paul's idea is tempting it ignores one of the basic rules of modern warfare which is essentially that for every guy carrying a rifle there are 5 guys driving trucks. The fact that we have outsourced a lot of that to "contractors" changes nothing. Unless we are going to withdraw from Korea.....dangerous....we need the support facilities in Japan.
Germany, of course, is a different story. It would take a monumental Russian offensive to cross all of the territory they have lost since the end of the Cold War and they have shown no ability whatsoever in that direction. Therein lies the problem with Paul. He is an ideologue who does not understand that one-size does not fit all. He is right in some places and wrong in others.
As for the "liberties" of my countrymen..... we have a decidedly spineless willingness to throw those away ourselves because of a bunch of towel-heads with exploding underwear.
Recall that the army overran Iraq in 3 weeks and then stood around for the next seven years with their thumbs up their asses getting blown up to the tune of 40,000 casualties because they had no real mission left.
The threat today does not come from other nations with conventional armies. It is far more nebulous. We have 11 carrier battle groups and no one else in the world has more than 1....and most of them are our allies. The Chinese have an old Russian p-o-s that they bought and re-furbished and to listen to our admirals you would think it was the British talking about the fucking Bismarck in 1940. We have terribly expensive aircraft that have never flown a combat mission because there is no use for them in a hovel in Afghanistan. Stealth aircraft are only useful when the enemy has radar coverage. There is precious little of that in the hills of Afghanistan. Our tank forces can go anywhere they want.... but the fuel trucks following along behind are highly vulnerable to any douchebag with an rpg. The list goes on.
We have a muscle-bound military designed to do one thing which now faces a different threat. To be sure there are special ops groups who can and do effectively discharge missions against actual terrorists but far too much of what we waste money on is to keep defense contractor profits up and jobs in congressional districts with no real conception of how these efforts actually aid in the defense of the nation against the ACTUAL threat. The Russians are not going to descend on the East Coast in landing craft. The Chinese are not going to swim to California.
Those red-scare days are over. But no one wants to face the reality because the military industrial complex has far too much influence in Washington....as Eisenhower warned and which we forgot to our shame.
