After my last story was “back to Somalia”, this story the U.S. moving back into bases in the Philippines. If we want China to feel surrounded and threatened, this seems like a pretty good move.

I seem to have issues of war and peace on my mind this morning (I am writing on Saturday, February 27, 2021). USA Today has a nice piece of data journalism on U.S. troop deployments and war costs around the world. This seems to be based mostly on the Costs of War project at Brown University, but the USA Today maps and graphics are very clean and informative at a glance. As usual, I’m going to tell you not to read this post and go look at their graphics instead!

• The U.S. military has engaged in ground combat in 8 countries since 2018 and conducted air strikes in 7 countries (some of these overlap, so it’s not 15 total). It has provided some form of training or assistance in 79 countries (again, overlapping). We have “up to” 800 military bases outside the U.S.
• Over 800,000 people have died in U.S.-involved wars since 2001, and over 300,000 of these were civilians. U.S. military troops and contractors killed total about 15,000, with most of these in Iraq and Afghanistan (significantly more in Iraq). [We manage to get a lot of allies killed for every American killed, to get a lot of enemy fighters killed for every “friendly” soldier killed, and roughly speaking around one civilian killed for every soldier killed. Are these measures of efficiency? Not in any moral sense, in my view. The civilian death toll alone suggests to me that the idea of “humanitarian war” is an oxymoron, because the innocent people you are getting killed are supposedly the ones you are trying to help. If they were instead living under the iron heel of some mad government, the body count might be lower. This might be true of any war in history, in my view, which might be a somewhat controversial view. But I am not suggesting turning a blind eye, I am suggesting doing what we can to help people through non-violent means.]
• The estimated cost of all this to the U.S. has been $6.4 trillion. About $130 billion of that was spent on diplomacy. The U.S. military budget (listed here as $731.8 billion dollars in 2019, but this must exclude a lot of intelligence, security, and nuclear spending outside the DOD), is equivalent to the military spending of the following countries in order of their spending: China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, UK, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. [Even setting aside the moral travesties and death and destruction, are we getting good value for our tax money? Or is it more like our health care and “pandemic preparedness” systems, where we spend the most and get average to poor results? We certainly couldn’t beat the countries above if they ganged up on us in a straight-out fight, I don’t think.]

Speaking of countries ganging up, there is now a group of potential World War III allies called “the quad“: the United States, Japan, India, and Australia. On the other side would be China and…I’m not sure, maybe Pakistan? Japan is saying its military may start firing missiles at Chinese ships that enter disputed waters, which it has not done before.

And finally, in what will be very old non-breaking news by the time this posts, the U.S. has apparently dropped some bombs in Syria, a sovereign country it is not clear whether we are at war with or not. This seems to have something to do with the U.S. relationship with Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and/or Israel. So our involvement in that unending regional proxy war grinds on at the same time we are rattling sabers at China and failing to tend to our significant problems at home.

The other day I called Biden pro-war, which might seem a little harsh. How would the U.S. actually go about reducing its military commitments, if it wanted to? I think the starting point is to realize that other countries are actually afraid of us. We have the world’s most powerful (most expensive anyway) military, and we use it frequently. The confrontations we are involved in with Russia and China tend to happen very close to those countries’ borders, and yet our rhetoric treats them as the aggressors.

Here is one set of ideas from the Defense Priorities think tank. Now, this think tank is funded by libertarian ideologues like Rand Paul, who just want to starve the government until it goes away, and corporate plutocrats like the Kochs, who just want to starve the government so they can keep all the money in their own pockets. Any money they save would not be reinvested in, say, Social Security if they were in charge. It would just be diverted to the rich and powerful. Nonetheless, the actual ideas for shrinking military commitments seem to be serious, and various factions who normally don’t agree might be able to come to a consensus in the short term, then argue about how to reinvest the proceeds later.

First step is to bring troops home from the Greater Middle East, from Afghanistan to Africa. Obama won a Nobel Prize just for saying he was going to do it. he didn’t do it. Trump said he was going to do it, and he also was not able to do it. Not only that, we blundered into conflicts in Libya and Syria under their administrations that seem intractable and have no obvious benefits, to us or to the people actually in those countries. It’s time to just announce dates for withdrawal and then withdraw.

Second step is to say NATO is done expanding. In retrospect, trying to expand NATO (starting under Bill Clinton) was very threatening to Russia, and we quickly lost their trust and cooperation. The nations of Europe are much more powerful technologically and economically than Russia. We can pull troops back while still supporting them with training and equipment (either giving or selling these things to them, the latter keeping the military-industrial complex here at home happier and less nervous.)

Similarly, in Asia we can pull troops back while supporting with training and equipment. South Korea and Japan are incredibly powerful countries that can fend for themselves day-to-day with some assurance that we would ride to their aid if actual armed conflict breaks out.

Terrorist threats can still be dealt with through intelligence and law enforcement operations. Arguably, our foreign military adventures have probably inspired more potential terrorists than if we had never gone on those adventures. We can make it clear that we are not a threat to other sovereign nations, and then we can spend a decade or two practicing what we preach so that they might actually start to believe what we say.

I might add to this negotiating hard for nuclear arms reductions and nonproliferation, and leading by example on these. Also reengaging and trying to reinvigorate the United Nations. Not being a military threat to other sovereign nations doesn’t mean we ignore human rights abuses within their borders. It means we work in concert with the world community to apply pressure to solve these problems.

Apparently, there is a fairly broad consensus that aircraft carriers are obsolete because they are too easy to attack with cheap missiles and eventually maybe space-based weapons. I know they are expensive, but I always thought the ability to get planes and soldiers anywhere in the world within a few days made sense as an alternative to maintaining large bases abroad. It’s always seemed to me that the navy is the most indispensible military service. After all, they have their own army (the Marines) and their own air force, and not only that but their army has its own air force. Plus, they have the submarines, which are the ultimate deterrent against nuclear attack, at least in theory.

Anyway, this article talks about getting rid of some carriers in favor of fleets of smaller, cheaper ships, possibly some crewed by robots. It also talks about a new class of carrier that is about one-third the size and one-third the cost, and meant to service helicopter and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Not sure whether you can “buzz the tower” in any of those.