What is wrong with military budget cuts?

Is this the future of military combat vehicles?
Backed by modern air power, Libyan rebels with pickup trucks defeated a modern army.  The age of ultra-expensive armored cars, trucks and tanks is over.  Expensive modern equipment simply acts as targets for modern missile technology.

The Military Screams for even more money

• The bureaucrat generals, like bureaucrats everywhere, say they never have enough money and that budget cuts are impossible.
• Generals and their political and business allies know that warfare has totally changed, but they refuse to change their endless spending. 
• After all, military spending is really all about jobs in key Congressional seats around the U.S.

With one hand the U.S. armed services like to say they are the world’s most ready and mobile military.  But with the other hand the generals are painting a picture of itself as a stagnant force trapped at home under automatic spending cuts just three weeks away.

To hear it said Army brigades won’t be ready to fight. Navy aircraft carriers won’t be deployed. The Air Force won’t be able to operate radar surveillance 24 hours a day.

The military brass scream about dire scenarios in a series of memos sent to Congress and obtained by The Washington Times. They stir memories of the late 1970s, when the Army declared itself a “hollow force” because depleted combat units could not perform in a war.

War has changed, but government spending as not.  Generals want endless spending, but the nation can only afford so much.

Technology has made large armies and navies almost obsolete.

Aircraft carrier HMS Formidable (67) after being struck by a Kamikaze off Sakishima Islands.  Propeller driven suicide piloted planes sunk three aircraft carriers and over 50 other vessels in World War II.  What carnage would modern missiles do to billion dollar navy ships?  Are navy ships now simply floating targets? 

Then their is the question of wasting limited money on useless and expensive World War II style weapons systems that make generals feel good, but have little value in modern war.

D-Day.  June 6, 1944  -  This was the day when modern land warfare changed.  Hitler's once all-powerful Panzer Divisions were obliterated from the air by primitive propeller driven planes.  German tanks and troops could not move ten feet without attracting swarms of aircraft.

Gulf War  -  Fast forward to the first Gulf War.  Iraq's expensive Soviet equipped military was defeated from the air before a single bullet was fired by a lowly infantryman.  Large armies are obsolete.  They have become nothing more than targets for modern technology.

Afghanistan & Libya  -  Technological death from the air has advanced so far that three guys can't sit around a campfire at night without being killed by a drone.  Small unit guerrilla warfare, not large armies, is the wave of the future.

The Navy  -  The air force is on the cutting edge.  But what of the navy?  The U.S. needs these floating platforms to protect American power. 

And this is the question of the day.  What to spend money on.  Does the navy have value?

We do need a navy.  The navy is good to intimidate small, fairly helpless nations and police the high seas.  But against anything resembling a modern military power I suspect the navies on both sides will be at the bottom of the sea in record time due to missile technology. 

The admirals, generals and politicians want big expensive navies.  But not much thought is given as to how long these ships would stay afloat.

The nation needs to be realistic about how large a military we can afford in a world of high tech terror weapons.


Read more: Washington Times.


Bombs fall on Libya's Ras Lanuf
Air power won the war for lightly armed Libyan rebels.

Your tax dollars at work.
An ultra expensive $140,000 American Humvee is made into scrap metal
by low priced homemade bombs.

The World War II Jeep.
Somehow the Allies beat the Axis Powers and Imperial Japan using economical vehicles like the jeep and half tracks. But now we are told that zillions of tax dollars MUST be spent on super expensive military vehicles like the Humvee. Is this excessive spending just to line the pockets of military contractors?

Modern air power won the day in Libya.
No sane person would operate a tank or other expensive equipment when enemy jets or drones are in the air or if the infantry is armed with proper anti-tank weapons.

"High Tech" mobile infantry in Libya . . . . and they won with fairly inexpensive equipment backed by modern air power clearing the battlefield in front of them of any meaningful enemy resistance.