Just how powerful is the United States..(militarily)???

Question

This was not writen by an American...This comes from an european newspaper...I post this in lue of the recent uprising in "loosing confidence of the American Military. Our boys and girls, of the USAF, are the finest in the world...There is no question about it...Anyway...This is what people in Britain think of our military capability...

Armed to the teeth

Is Bush's awesome increase in military spending a reasonable response to the afermath of September 11, or is he creating a force almost too powerful for its own good? Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy report

Is America too powerful for its own good?

You can have your say online here.

Observer Worldview

Sunday February 10, 2002
The Observer


There is a United States special forces dog-handler who meets journalists, diplomats and aid workers off the UN flight to Kabul. His job is to search luggage and ensure the security of US troops in Afghanistan. He is short, gingery and aggressive. His skills at persuasion are limited to shouting at the milling crowd: 'Stand back! Stand back! My dog will bite!'
Last week that phrase had become the defining motto and operating credo for the military and foreign policy of the Bush administration. Already President George W. Bush has put Iran, Iraq and North Korea on notice as terrorist-sponsoring nations at the centre of an international 'axis of evil', despite the CIA's recent evidence that none of them was in the business of threatening the United States at present.

Last Monday, to back that explicit threat, he announced an increase in US military spending of 15 per cent, the biggest in 20 years, more than double the military spending in all of the European Union. The rise will be $36 billion (£26.5bn) this year, $48 billion next year and $120 billion over the next five years, rising to a staggering two trillion over the next five years.

Even this is not enough for General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They want the US defence budget to increase at an even faster rate.

What all this means is clear. Troubled by the 11 September attacks and buoyed by the ease of the war against Afghanistan, Bush's message to the 'evil doers' of the world is that he has a dog; that it is very big, getting bigger, and certainly it will bite.

The puzzle about the latest rise in defence spending is that America at the beginning of the 21st century is already not so much a superpower as a behemoth on the world stage. Economically dominant, it enjoys military and cultural power unrivalled since the days of the Roman emperors, as the American author Robert D. Kaplan reminds us in his new book, Warrior Politics.

Typically, it has been left to the French, traditionally suspicious of US global hegemony, to find the best words to describe it. Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America's ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large it is sick.

The question the rest of the world is asking itself is: Who is the enemy America is arming itself so against? And why?

'Ostensibly,' says one European diplomat, 'this is about security. But quite how a massive increase in defence spending is supposed to prevent another terrorist attack remains unclear. Instead this seems to be about repairing the bruised American psyche after 11 September. America's powerlessness in the face of this attack requires big gestures and reassurances, even if they are counter-productive and meaningless.'

Indeed, some analysts say, if it is security that America seeks it is better sought in dialogue with potentially threatening states, rather than in reinforcing the idea already held by many anti-US groups that it is an evil empire bent on world domination.

Cynics have identified more overtly self-serving strands in the Republican obsession with America's defence. The 'war' rhetoric, as some US liberal commentators have pointed out, serves a purely domestic Republican agenda in the post-11 September mood of national paranoia: to win Bush a second presidential term and, in the shorter term, regain Congress.

The reality - even before the latest proposed increases in military spending - is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back. The requirement that US armed forces be able to fight two fully fledged wars with two separate adversaries simultaneously may recently have been dropped, but only because it would be hard pushed to find two such equal foes to fight.

A single US nuclear-powered carrier group - which forms around the USS Enterprise, for example, with a flight deck almost a mile in length and a superstructure 20 storeys high - concentrates more military power in one naval group than most states can manage with all their armed forces. America has seven of these battle groups.

It is not just the scale and power of these weapons systems. The reach of US arms, too, is awesome. When the USS Kitty Hawk was sent with its accompanying warships from Yokohama to the Gulf for the war against Afghanistan, it covered 6,000 miles in just 12 days to be transformed into a vast floating forward attack station for thousands of US special forces.

Its B-52 bombers can fly and refuel across the world armed with cruise missiles that can be fired hundreds of miles away from hostile skies, the missiles themselves directed to their targets by satellites in orbit.

And America's supremacy in bombs, planes, satellites, tanks and real-time intelligence have made the prospect of US casualties remote, except in the event of ****-up or disaster. And, significantly, as the world's only economic hyper-power, it can afford this level of militarisation.

But against all this even the manufacturers of America's arms - like the aviation giant Lockheed-Martin - have been struggling for a decade or so to define the threat its top-shelf jets will be battling in the skies, being forced in one memorable presentation to show the European Eurofighter as a potential adversary.

So why the need for more and better military power? Even military analysts are baffled. 'The rise in US military spending,' says Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, 'ought to be compared to the decision in the First World War to order up more cavalry when the first wave had been mown down by machine-guns.

'The US has no competitor in high-tech military equipment. And what it is spending its money on is mostly irrelevant against the knives used to carry out 11 September. The bombing of Afghanistan has created the illusion of victory.'

Professor Paul Kennedy at Yale University calculates that the US now spends more each year than the next nine largest national defence budgets combined. Indeed America is responsible for about 40 per cent of the world's military spending.

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with the rest of the world. The strategy is aimed at countering China. The US Administration that if America is to retain its dominance sometime over the next 20 years it will have to fight Chinese forces. This is about preparing for that day.

Answer 2

1. It should be remembered that unsustainable defense spending brought down the Soviet Empire. The US is becoming more and more indebted to China and other overseas lenders. It can diminish that burden -- once -- by devaluation, something that is happening now gradually. But aside from instituting currency controls or repudiating the debt (and putting at risk massive US manufacturing investment in China) it can do nothing to avoid servicing the debt, and hoping that it may be rolled over indefinitely.

2. While spending vast sums, sometimes unwanted by the military itself, the US is nickel-and-diming the troops. And because it is unable or unwilling to impose conscription it is relying on lower quality voluntary recruits. The burden of third and fourth tours in Iraq and Afghanistan is making it difficult to meet enlistment and re-enlistiment targets.

3. All the hardware in the world will not resolve the Islamist guerilla threat. Inevitably, the terrorist an guerilla enemy will lead to an erosion and a reversal, of human rights norms established after World War II: an end to asymmetrical (non-reciprocal) grant of rights as under the Geneva conventions and the various human rights documents. As of now, only the Geneva and New York Refugee Conventions impose a requirement of reciprocity (a candidate for refugee status is ineligible if he is a war criminal, terrorist, etc.)

4. The State's first priority, first loyalty, is to the survival of its own institutions. Vested interests, including existing frontiers, are sacrosanct and ancient injustsice to generations now dead carry no weight. The Islamists in Britain are in for some surprises. In Lebanon, Hezbollah (whether it cares or not, for the moment) is just learning that the right of self-defence is primeval. And that whatever philosophers may debate today about Dresden and Hiroshima, there was no such debate when they happened and there will be no debate when the State feels itself threatened in the future.

5. The mere existence of the terrible weaponry described in your quoted article may become "justification" for their use. If only "pour encourager les autres".

Answer 3

You sit there enjoying the peace and protection that America's might provides. If they did not have the "dog that will bite" then who would have the money, balls or sheer confidence to prevent evil little buggers who hate us as infidels from doing god knows what! The events that have been rolling out over the last 60 years and punctuated by events like (though thank god are few and far between) 9/11 are pushing humanity into two distinct groups - Islamic/Islamic sympathisers - against Christian democratic. Those countries that sit on the fence will inexorably be drawn in when there inactivity blows up in their face. If it wasn't for the fact that the USA is so big and powerfull we would all be in a far more precarious position right now and to use a metaphor such as the cavalry against machine guns quote is just plain silly.
I for one am glad for the protection on a global scale that the USA provides (I'm English) and grateful too. I'm also very happy with the military escalation and only wish it were on an even larger scale.

Answer 4

Being ex British special forces I am biased!....The Americans look after their troops far better than we do. They get the kit they need and more besides. They learned a lot from Vietnam and are putting those lessons into practice. The average American soldier is just that,average. But then he has no need to be highly trained as he has some of the best technology at his disposal.

British Army on the other hand has to do it all with f uck all kit and s odding useless back up. Try being stuck in Iraq with a radio that doesn't work, A satellite phone that picks up a signal once every leap year and you are wearing kit you bought from an army/navy surplus store because good old Tony Blair had spent the money for your kit on Housing a F ucking immigrant!

Add to that a GPS system that would struggle to find a continent let alone a road or town and a Land rover that has permanent pmt! Its time the British government realised their army is their to protect them not to play c ocksucker to Bush. Stop lining the pockets of the old boy network and give us some decent kit that f ucking works, you bat eared f uckwit!

Answer 5

Good question.

I've long had a theory that Soviet glasnost and China's so-called opening in 72 are nothing more than a Communist grand plan to weaken and ultimately destroy the "Main Enemy".

Possibly few here were born when Nixon went to Beijing. What has happened in the intervening thirty years tells a LOT !.

Gone to China has the industrial base, gone to China has a huge amount of capital...Who has gained on net balance ?.

And _WHO_ is really behind terrorism ?. I can see a third partying strategy designed to bring the US into various quagmires that would ultimate debilitate her political will to fight, and ultimately crumbling dowjn in chaos, social, economic, military or likely a combination thereof. In this LONG TERM strategy the former Soviet Union and China have been solid allies.

North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, etc are all part of the show.
Noticed all the mutual state visits ? What's that tell you ?

And one day comes, just HOW MANY fires can the Fire Brigade go put out ?

Why shake a tree to get the apple when you can just help the ripening process right along ?.

Ask yourselves some questions, DAD-BURNIT !

In addition the encircling by China in Latin America speaks powerfully to this suspicion. Fact is, the US cannot and does not enforce the Monroe Doctrine to any extent. I'm finished.

Anyone here thinking that I'm talking about Marilyn Monroe needs to hit the books.

Answer 6

Depends on who the USA is fighting.

If they USA is fighting a conventional army then, yes they are very powerful and probably have more tanks, guns and soldiers than anyone else.

However, if they are fighting terrorist, who hid amongst the crowd then they are not well suited.

When the Islamic terrorists crashed the planed on 9/11 then USA was powerless to respond.

They best they could do was to invade Afghanistan, a country which was used a base for Al Qaeda.

So what happens AFTER Afghanistan and Iraq ? When the terrorists are still killing innocent Americans in some "holy jihad" ? Who is the USA gonna bomb then ?

Answer 7

It's just another narrow-minded view by someone who cannot see the forest for the trees. I guess that North Korea's recent missile test should be seen as a game of horse shoes and that someone else is going to foot the bill for our war on terrorism. I tire of those who have nothing but criticism while sitting in the stands. I tell them to put yourself in the seat of the President, and without changing the course of events, or placing any conditions on the situation, what would they do. We are too spread out trying to solve everyone's problems. I think we can afford to pull in the reins a bit and let other countries that want to go to war with one another have their way.

Answer 8

The US are very stong, which is reinforced by their smart weapons and equipment.

I do not put their troops better than any other though. That would be doing many countries a disservice.
Their special forces are no better, and have been tested to be inferior to other nations.

The US can build up as many troops and weapons as they like to feel secure.

What they seem to not realise is that a war on terror cannot be won this way.

Prevention of terrorism must be done by intelegance.

The USA has doen too much poking around in other peoples countries and cultures.

It considers itself the worlds police man. But to whose legal system????????

It is a stereotype that generally the USA has no idea there is a world outside of teh USA.

Answer 9

Let me remind you that America is at war with Iraq, possibly iran in the future and thats generally what you do in wars, spend lots of money on the military

Answer 10

Don't forget that there are nearly 100 million people in America that own their own firearms as well. That is for home defense. Perhaps the pussified europeans should be ready to protect themselves as well, instead of relying on America to do so!

Now all you dern varmints get your guns and ammo ready for these ragheads!!!!!