Does America really need projection power in this day and age?

^^ Exactly. As The Falklands War showed, any country with an air force will negate your naval capabilities without serious force projection capabilities e.g. carriers/other capital ships.

Imagine if the 1991 Gulf War had to be resolved without the big ships of the US Navy or the US military's logistical standpoint. It would have turned into a WW 1 slugfest for the Arab nations owing to lack of logistical support and manpower. Do you really think Yugoslavia would have resolved itself as quietly as it did in the 1990s without the US Air Force? Do you honestly think the 1953 ceasefire in Korea would have lasted this long without serious force projection and firepower capabilities?

There are a thousand scenarios where it shows it's better to err on the side of caution and remain force projection capable than shy back and act like it's 1921.

edited 10th Nov '11 12:09:43 PM by MajorTom

And how exactly do you propose to pay for this lovely "police of the world" position you demand that we take?

Can't raise taxes on the rich, oh no sir, they're the job creators! All that leaves is the social safety net, and the middle class and the poor, to bear the brunt of your neoconservative bullshit.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Eisenhower saw right through you. He saw right through all the military-industrial bastards, through Congress, through the Cold War, through it all.

And I do too.

edited 10th Nov '11 12:19:59 PM by USAF713

We already pay for it. And We can tax the rich. Its only the republicans that hate that idea, and theres more registered dems. then repubs.

And a little more tax is much better then being constantlly attacked by dictators and terrorists

edited 10th Nov '11 12:17:41 PM by Joesolo

More taxes for what? A Roman peace? Our "peace" is no peace at all. It is the calm before the next war.

I could turn a handful African nations into First World countries for a third of the current US Military budget. That is unacceptable, and it is not our place to force the world to pretend like it can solve its problems by glaring at each other, rather than simply allowing them to see the folly of their actions themselves.

edited 10th Nov '11 12:23:15 PM by USAF713

You can't turn a third world country into a first world country by just throwing money at it. We've tried. And if were not spending money on protecting the world so we can save money, who are you to say we should spend it on something else?

We've spent more than that in foreign aid in the last 10 years and NOT A SINGLE African country has even reached First World status, let alone a handful of countries.

I'm not saying we necessarily should. I'm saying that it's disgusting that we spend our time and energy on a uselessly self-destructive arms race when a third of the budget we do it with is more than the GDP of 49 out of 52 nations in Africa.

That's because we don't do foreign aid correctly at all, and it's really just a trap to keep them poor and easy to exploit for resources.

Point is, the military budget is massive and wasted on policing a world that will never learn until it gets the lesson that Europe got in the World Wars. In the meantime, there are tens of millions of people in the United States—"land of the free," "land of opportunity," "the home of the American Dream," etc.—and those that aren't poor should be making so much more if wages weren't artificially low and the economic elite didn't rule the country with an iron fist through the market and their patsies in Congress.

We SEND THEM FREE FOOD AND MEDICINE. HOW THE HELL IS THAT KEEPING THEM POOR?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Then too bad. The genie's out of the bottle, we can't go back to isolationism. Worse, this country has NEVER been about "let's help everyone get X first". They don't call us the land of opportunity because everyone is guaranteed a livable wage job by government law. (Doing just that by force of law would quickly render us uncompetitive against everyone. There are no living wage requirement laws in Europe countries even the Nordic states, what makes you think it'll work here?)

What is it that Major Tom once said...

"Putting a Band-Aid on a rifle wound?"

A better way to put it is thus: "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for the rest of his life."

What makes me think it would work here? Simple, take Jeysie's idea (which I have come to like):

If your businesses don't pay our minimum wage, you don't get to sell your shit here, period.

And then watch the outsourcing bastards sink like stones.

Military isolationism is perfectly feasible. All I hear is the equivalent of a group of old busybody grandmas sitting on a porch complaining that if they didn't gossip nobody would know about anyone else's business.

It's not our problem. We make it our problem, and it would not be otherwise. If you stop actively fucking with people, the problem disappears.

Free food wrecks any food agriculture they might have. Medicine is mostly fine. Basically if the aid is competing with native industries (or substituting for something they could make a lot of cheaply) then you kill their industry. Poor nations can make cheap food, and cheap textiles (think Nikes). Anything where unskilled (lacking a degree) human labor is competitive with other methods. If we flood the markets with those things, they can't keep making them for the local market and can't develop into the global market. There are several papers by African economist on this subject, frequently with colorful titles.

Were giving them food, while at the same time engaging in things to develope sustainable agriculture. Were giving them fish so they don't starve while we teach them too fish.

Has no one mentioned that some african governments are particularly corrupt? You send them money and most of it go to the oligarchy in power (which is already very rich). They've been corrupt for a long time, I'd think probably ever since the cold war, although I admit it isn't something I've particularly researched. And despite this, of course, african countries are improving; I'd think South Africa or Egypt are probably better economically than they were a decade or two ago. But of course you can't expect them to be first world countries tomorrow if you give them money today, it probably takes some time to invest into an infrastructure, and a working economy (probably even with some trial-and-error there).

Yup. It's very important to have a military that encourages them to not invade each other.

It's important to have humanitarian help and education and opportunities in the global economy system so that they don't feel the need to invade each other, that is. And of course, it's also very important to make the countries' borders match the different ethnic groups, this being one of the main reasons for war in Africa.

Yea. The europeans really screwed that up when they left. They didn't realise their random lines don't apply to tribes.

@ Joesolo

As already mentioned, "free" food is actually not aid whatsoever. It's market dumping and kills their agricultural industry. So in fact, it does not help. Unless they were 100% socialist economies, giving them free food wrecks everything in a free market environment.

Canada, which commits the most to the World Food Programme at the UN, donates all of its aid in the form of cash money. This can be then used to buy local agricultural products in order to boost the economy of African countries. This is very different from the USA which gives 100% of its aid in American food. US aid destroys economies. Canadian aid is like a stimulus package.

@ Tom

What the Falkland Wars demonstrates is that you require projection power if you wish to maintain your Empire. The territory has little to do with Britain, as anybody in geography can tell you, it was merely a matter of pride in keeping territory they managed to colonise half way across the world. You want to maintain this, then yes, you require full carrier fleets and so on.

As for the Gulf War, if it weren't for the USA, then everyone else would have to pitch in more. I'm willing to do that, I think you're just unwilling to see a world in which the void that the USA leaves would be filled in, leaving you with no argument. It doesn't cost Canada that much to perform peacekeeping duties.

I'm reminded of that episode on Stargate Universe in which a world is built by the duplicate survivors of the Stargate team, except that Dr Rush wasn't there. But Rush felt without his brilliance, the team would utterly fail. Except they didn't. Instead they built a civilisation from a handful of people, colonised the whole planet and managed to come together and resolve their black hole situation peacefully.

In the same way, you act as if the USA stops having bases across the world, stops having massive naval fleets and so on, that the world would suddenly implode and destroy itself. Let the UN do its job. You can complain that it's Russia/China stopping the UN from functioning, but when USA is number two on the veto-usage list, I think it's pretty clear, you should be bitching at the US government because they're also one of the people preventing the system from working as well as it could. Heck, USA cut funding to UNESCO over Palestinian membership, that's pretty petty.

@ USAF

Indeed, through the UN and NATO you can perform peacekeeping at a fraction of the cost. The logistic support is really what is needed and the more countries involved in peacekeeping, the less bases of your own you need to use and you can just borrow other people's bases as needed.

edited 10th Nov '11 2:57:34 PM by breadloaf

While I broadly agree with the rest of your post, I take issue with this. The Falklands' inhabitants are British citizens and therefore entitled to protection as such, especially from tinpot military juntas. While there was an issue of pride, the intervention can't really be described as imperialistic.

edited 10th Nov '11 3:02:29 PM by pagad

Well my point wasn't that Britain should have left its people to die or something. My point was that the land was only British because it was one of the few lands still under direct British control from the Imperial days and the British government wanted to maintain that. Thus projection power was required.

If it was just a Commonwealth territory like Canada or Australia, then the different response would have been allied assistance there but Thatcher wanted to make it a British military campaign. At the time, Canada had an airforce of several hundred planes plus some hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Add to British military, plus Australian and so on, no way Argentina could have competed with that.

Ah, okay, fair enough then. I've just ended up in a lot of arguments with people about the Falklands War when the "I" word gets chucked around a lot

Most of Europe does seem to have minimum wage legislation that connects it to a cost-of-living index (the minimum wages are reviewed annually based on these indices.)

As for the Nordic countries, it's even less the type of system that Republicans would want: the employers' unions negotiate the national minimum wages for each industry and other work-related issues with the workers' unions, either annually or for a couple of years forward; the government participates in the negotiations.

Again, just dropping some info, not trying to derail and not expecting a reply.

edited 10th Nov '11 4:23:51 PM by BestOf

Exactly.

I mean, in many other First World countries, the minimum wage already is a living wage. It's here that the minimum wage is something to laugh in the general direction of if you're actually trying to live off it, so we have to actually talk about a separate concept of a living wage.

edited 10th Nov '11 4:34:14 PM by Jeysie

Yeah I remember the Nordic countries doing it via union, I thought that rather weird but oh well, each their own. Not to derail too much, but here it is set by the province and everyone has adopted the practice of increasing minimum wage based on inflation. In the last 5 years, I think all of the provinces (last one did it this year, which was British Columbia) gave their minimum wage a massive boost for the lack of inflation increases since the 80s. So roughly, the minimum wage is about 9 something USD to about 11 USD depending on where you live (more north, the higher it is due to cost of living).

When there starving to death from famine, Free food is not "ruining their agriculutre". Famine means the effectivly HAVE NO AGRICULTURE. Unless millions starving to death would help them magically develope farming techniques, then by all means, let them starve!

What about giving them money and help their business and help them having a better educational system so that people are actually able to have jobs and buying their own food so that you won't eventually need to feed them? It's always more efficient to fight against the cause than against its consequences, because, you know, then you won't have to fight something forever.