As soon as World War II ended, we embarked on a carelessly precipitous demobilization that junked one of the most fearsome Western armies ever assembled. Just having liberated Europe, we still managed to find ourselves unprepared for the onset of the Korean War.
Defenders of the current defense cuts say that we still spend more on our military than anyone else in the world. True, but we aren’t a mere regional power. Unless we want to outsource patrolling the global sea lanes to China and the security of Europe to Russia, we will always have to spend substantially more than anyone else does.
Our allies aren’t in any position to pick up the slack. When the French army wants to go anywhere, we have to fly it. The entire British navy is smaller than the fleet sent to take back the Falklands in the 1980s.
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