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More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.
In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.
Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.
So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.
What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?
This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.
Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.
Well, knowing Trump, this is probably just empty boasting + big round numbers ("ten billion dollars") + grift for him and his cronies.
But if it actually goes through, I can see the logic to it. China is rapidly buiding up its navy, much faster than the US and allied nations. We can't use nuclear weapons because they do too (plus it's just horrible). And raw dollars are misleading, since their military gets paid a lot less, so in PPP it's a lot closer. Same with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Hell, we've been fighting the Houthis for over a year now, and we still haven't been able to completely shut them down. Some ships are still avoiding that area. The US can protecdt its homeland, but it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of global dominance that it once had.
The obvious conflict would be China trying to take Taiwan. I have a hard time modelling this as a shooting war between the US and China which does not have a significant risk of evolving into a nuclear war.
Basically, any invasion would be supported by assets in mainland China, and trying to fend it off without striking at them would be like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Of course, once you bomb military assets in a densely populated region, shit is going to happen. Sooner or later the Chinese will ask themselves why they should suffer their hospitals being blown up without also retaliating against the mainland US (though I imagine that the CCP is more resistant to public pressure than the US -- but even they are not immune, see the covid lockdowns).
I am surprised that you are surprised by anyone's failure to pacify a region through bombardments alone.
I mean, sure, the US could turn the area the Houthis control in a parking lot. However, this would kill tons of innocent civilians and we don't do that anymore. It is not that the Houthis have a single enormous catapult which you can destroy to shut them up. Presumably, the weapons they use to attack ships are man-portable, and likely hidden in their deepest cellars of the towns.
To really crush them while also leaving a few civilians alive, you would need boots on the ground. Given how previous US operations of that sort have turned out, I think it is correct to be sceptical.
What is your argument exactly.... that no amount of larger military spending could possibly beat a small insurgent group like the houthis, but it's also useless against major powers because everything would just be nukes? most military simulations do not agree with either of those.
His argument RE: houthis seems simple and obvious: No feasible amount of spending can obviate the need to commit to either a strategy of eradicating yemen entirely or one of putting it under indefinite occupation.
We could it at least give it a shot, before we give up on it entirely. Right now the US is just tickling them with small amounts of precision tomahawk missile strikes. This isn't like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we're trying to pacify an entire large country. We just want to stop a thin strip of land near the sea from launching missiles at ships.
Alright, revise my post to "eradicate any human presence on the coast of yemen or occupy it indefinitely". Or what exactly are you suggesting? Patrolling the waters to intercept all boats that might conceivably contain pirates, check them for weapons, then detain the armed ones - forever? And intercept any missiles through technological means? AFAIK (which is little) that's close to what's already being done, maybe throwing more money at that could indeed tighten the mesh until shipping can return to normal. But would that be a permanent solution?
Increased PGM strikes and naval bombardments until they've destroyed all of the anti-ship missiles that the Houthis got from Iran. It doesn't need to be a genocide or an extended occupation. It's just the sort of thing that having more mass of conventional weapons in your military helps a lot with, which is why I support this sort of budget increase.
Consider Gaza. It is tiny: 40km by perhaps 10km. It has been blockaded by Israel (a first world nation on the same tech level as the US) for decades. After the Hamas attacks, Israel fought hard to reduce Hamas capabilities, with very limited concern for the civilian population. Years later, and the surviving militants still find the odd missile to fire in the general direction of Israel.
Realistically, stopping the Houthi attacks on shipping will require someones boots on the ground. The obvious choice would be to just give the opposed party in their civil war (the republic of Yemen) enough materiel to conquer their opponent, then turning a blind eye to the human rights violations which will certainly follow their victory (if they achieve their victory, that is).
Quite frankly, I am not sure if this is a good idea. A mixed strategy of limited suppression of launch sites, interception of anti-ship missiles and establishing a missile attack insurance system might be more reasonable.
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