The economic crisis and its implications

He raises some good points, particularly about intelligence. It is perhaps interesting to note that if we had had a decent Intelligence set-up right now, we might not even be in Afghanistan, never mind Iraq - the US government would have nailed most or all of the future hijackers before they ever boarded the fateful planes, and the whole thing would have gone down as another prevented terrorism attack. A huge part of stopping terrorism is work down at home, and that means proper visa checks, monitoring of potentially hazardous materials, and monitoring the emergence of dangerous groups within the US.

I think he doesn't go far enough with a "defensive" strategy. If we were truly about shifting to a defensive posture, then we would focus on three things:

1)"Globalizing" America's fundamental resource needs, like oil and other materials. This means that we could, if necessary, substitute resources from one area for another, and the overall cost would be low enough that we wouldn't be tempted to play the traditional Great Power Resource Politics.

2)Re-aligning the military. Ironically, the "increase the army" reformers are going about this the wrong way. If you really wanted to shift the military and lower its major costs (Operations and Personnel), then what you would do is

-Maintain a state-of-the-art Navy. The Navy has been the backbone of America's security since the early 19th century, and it will continue to be as such as long as we have global needs for economic reasons. In the modern world, that means aircraft carriers. It's also one of those things that you can't easily build up to in a hurry if you need to anymore in the event of a Major War that it would be costly to stay out of (like World War 2).

-Maintain a state-of-the-art Air Force. Threats to the US don't necessarily come by ship - they can also come by plane (nuclear bombers and otherwise). An air force is important to stopping this, and it has the same issue as the Navy regarding a rapid build-up.

-Maintain a state-of-the-art nuclear arsenal, and build more nuclear bombers (get away from ICBMs, which are much less controllable and more and more easily shot down). Ultimately, deterrence of any conventional threat to the U.S. will come down to the threat of nuclear weapons (not to mention that effective nuke power can help prevent a Great Power War from arising). We could technically switch over to an Eisenhower-style "Massive Retaliation" posture, where we draw our strength mainly from the nuclear threat, but it's better to have the Navy and Air Force so that we can block a range of threats in-between (as well as intervene in any Great Power War, if necessary).

-Gut the active Army, by which I mean we cut its active strength drastically down. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but the idea would be that we would keep the active Army small so as to discourage long-term interventions abroad (but not wipe out the espirit de corps). You would couple this with a much larger Army Reserve force.

The idea would be that if we ran into a war we couldn't avoid without great harm (like a World War 2 or even Korean War equivalent), then what we'd do is send in the active duty Army plus activate the Reserves. At the same time, you'd get production going on replacements for the spare parts and equipment you've been stockpiling (since it takes longer to produce this stuff, it's better to have a stockpile on hand), and start warming up the active-duty training and recruitment programs. That way, if the War was long enough, you could gradually shift out the Reserve troops for new active-duty troops, and the political issue with calling out tons of the reserves would act as a self-limiter.

-Keep the Marines. You need them mainly to serve as a rapid strike force (in case some crisis breaks out near at home and we need some short-term peacekeeping, like in Haiti back in the 1990s), and a "first landing" group (presumably, in this alignment, we wouldn't have a bunch of overseas bases to start the build-ups from) to seize landing area.

There, now how does that sound as a military force aligned to avoid interventions? It would probably be anathema to both Republicans (who like the idea of being able to intervene abroad), and Democrats (who want a military capable of doing a bunch of peace-keeping duties), but it would almost certainly save you some money on Operating Costs (the capital expenses would be high, but the operating costs - Operations and Personnel - would be lower).

3)Dampening most military ties except when they co-incide with the above. I'd keep the East Asia security agreements, particularly with Japan - it prevents an arms race in that area, and it doesn't require tons of U.S. personnel. It would basically be using the Navy as a deterrence method while protecting the trade routes and the like - good security in the area for what is increasingly central trade with that region in terms of our economy.

On the other hand, getting out of the Middle East as quickly as possible and severing or weakening ties that bind us to action (like oil) can only help us. We don't share a land border with that region, and our main tie - resources- would presumably be considerably dampened in this scenario. Let the Europeans/Russians/Chinese deal with this area - the Europeans have no choice since many of their immigrants hail from there, and the Russians and Chinese are next-door neighbors interested in stability. We have a relatively small Arabic or even Muslim population, who are generally on decent terms with the U.S. government(and would probably be on even greater terms if the U.S. distanced itself from Israel), and who most likely would not support the kind of crap that you see coming out of the European muslim populations in terms of home-grown terrorism groups.

Of course, like any real defensive-posture Grand Strategy, this would be rather cold-blooded in an age of rapid communications. We would basically have to stand aside and let some horrors ensue that might not otherwise come (although perhaps not - had we, for example, simply sold weapons to the Bosnian Serbs early on in a dispassionate, non-involved manner, the situation would have been more of a civil war than a series of atrocities), and work to distance ourselves from the consequences. It would probably lead to a lot of howling about the U.S. not taking an active role in things, but there you are.

I think it's interesting that this post has gotten so few responses, and the two it did get were not particularly apposite.

Economic meltdown. We've been living for a long time with a trade imbalance -- we import more than we export, and we make up the difference with foreign debt. We've reduced our foreign debt somewhat by foreigners playing our stock market and losing money in big slumps, at the dot.com bust and more recently. We've reduced it somewhat by foreigners buying our mortgages and derivatives that then defaulted. But we still have a great big foreign debt and we have no idea how to sell stuff to foreigners to help even it out. No idea.

For awhile we said that our intellectual capital made the difference, that foreigners would have to pay us royalties on what they made because they used our ideas which were so much better than their ideas. This seems not to be bringing in enough money, though.

For awhile we said that our financial wizardry would bring in the money. We were so much better than anybody else at making useful financial instruments that we could make lots of money selling them. Foreigners didn't understand how to make them as well as we did, so they'd buy ours. But that market has shut down.

We have no idea how to make up the difference. We buy more than we sell, and we go deeper in debt. We need to spend a whole lot of money to revamp our military so it will be able to fight a modern army. The main modern army we have to consider is china. Depending on how you split up the budget items, it could be correctly said that every dollar we spend this year to improve our military (or to fight in the middle east) has to be borrowed from china.

"When we build a military that can conquer china, the chinese communists will loan us the money." Have I heard something like that before?

How long will this go on? How long can it go on? We talk as if the economy will have no effect on our military spending. We just keep the same old objectives and the same old planning and the same old schedules and carry on. Can we do that even if we want to?

Is there any reason to think the economy will improve quickly? Any reason to think we can do our military planning without taking the economy into account?

As they get stronger they're going to think about what their interests are, and they might easily not want to be allied with the US boat anchor.

There is that. Of course, as it is now, that seems somewhat distant - there is strong support for the "self-defense-only" article in the Japanese constitution among the Japanese people, and Japan's neighbors are very nervous at any sign of Japanese militarism. I personally wouldn't be too annoyed with it, as long as we maintained the naval ability to smack them down or at least make them pay if they tried to cut us off from trading over there.

I think the Japanese are more comfortable sitting behind the US military shield and simply throwing money around at international problems.

I'm concerned about your idea to blockade the chinese coast or bomb their ports. If we choose a limited war with china, can we be sure china will fight a limited war with us?

As long as we stuck to simply bombing the ports and blockading the costs (which would hurt the US a lot economically but absolutely devastate China), what could they realistically do? They could shoot down our planes, or try to break the blockade (a good deal of their naval strategy up until recently was about the latter), but as long as we maintained superiority in that area and didn't try anything so foolish as to escalate the situation to a land war, they'd have little to counter it aside from nukes. That's a no-go from their area except if the regime itself was under significant threat, and even then they'd be at a disadvantage - they have a much smaller number of much less accurate nuclear weapons than the United States, and the US is building missile defense.