When I was in the marines, I always heard about how there was a contingent in the military (mostly army officers) that wanted to disband the marines and merge them with the army. I'm not exactly sure if that's true but it certainly sounds plausible. Anyway, this got me thinking about the role of our military in the implementation of future foreign policy and how it would make more sense to reduce the size of the army and air force instead. From my standpoint, our foreign policy should center almost exclusively around domestic defense and free trade. This would necessitate a reprioritization in the size and scope of each branches's mission and here is my ideal restructuring. The "main effort", so to speak, would be the navy, namely, their ships, subs, and planes. Their job would be to protect international trade routes and form a protective "bubble" around the US. The marines would retain their mission as the naval infantry, and in the context of my ideal foreign policy, they would be used to (a) secure US naval bases and US embassies and (b) spearhead a land invasion in the event of war or imminent threat to US security. Now, as to the army. I've always seen them as the giant who plops down in the enemy's lap and crushes them to death. It is a massive and powerful conventional force designed to smother the landscape and reshape it in its image using numbers, firepower, and logisitics. Basically, they are the nationbuilder, but do we really need a nationbuilder on retainer anymore? It is my opinion that we do not, and that we should stop trying to export democracy and western civilization. Therefore, it is my opinion that the army should retain all its core components - armor, artillery, infantry, logistics, administration, air cav - but at a substantially reduced size. This would impact the logistics and administration components the most. If we are not nationbuilding and occupying, then we do not need to maintain a massive global military supply chain. This brings me to the air force. First and foremost, they would retain their mission of protecting our skies. Obviously, though, if the global military supply chain is reduced in size and scope to maintaining naval bases and nothing else, the air force would have much less to do and this would necessitate a commensurate reduction in their size. Bottom line is that I would refocus on combat elements and reduce the size of our administrative and logistical elements in all the forces. That is how we can maintain a solid national defense and secure our economy while reducing the size of the military. Sorry, I kind of burned out at the end there. Let me hear your opinions.
I'd also assume a withdraw form Nato. The biggest problem i see is that the navy would still be extremely exploitable for blocking other trade routs, and using small contingents to back up proxy armies to over-through governments like recently happened in Somalia. Subs can patrol most trade routes fine and warships can come if they need to, carriers should strictly remain in the US waters unless the country is directly in danger. Don't forget your military serves the president first and foremost and that position has almost always had ulterior motives for waging war. Limiting their ability to wage it for these purposes should be the number two priority after being able to defend yourself.
Isolationism by any other name is still isolationism. And yea, the Army several times has proposed absorbing the Marine Corps. But that was always killed because the Navy is not about to give up it's Marines. And since WWII, that has pretty much ended any other future discussions of the concept.
A foreign policy that centers around protecting international trade and travel cannot, by definition, be considered "isolationism". Misrepresenting non-interventionist foreign policy as "isolationism" is the number one tactic used by its opponents to avoid a substantive discussion of its merits. If you have any specific objections to my plan, I'd like to hear them, but mislabeling it as "isolationism" is just a tired and lame tactic that won't work.
How would the Navy's ability to block trade be a bad thing? You have to look at it from the perspective of the United States. They want to maintain the ability to as you say "exploit" trade routes and use small proxy armies. It doesn't mean they have to use it, but the entire point of investing billions of dollars into a Navy is to have it as a deterrent. Right now the U.S. Navy is by far the most powerful on earth. There isn't a single Navy or even a feasible coalition of Navies that could defeat it on the open seas. This gives the U.S. an incredible amount of leverage when it comes to protecting it's own interests. Why would they relinquish that power? Why would they consider allowing China, France, or Britain to catch up? If you haven't noticed, the world has experienced an unprecedented level of global trade in the last few decades....all of it under the "watch" of the U.S. Navy. Also, keeping your aircraft carriers in territorial waters defeats the entire purpose of having them. Finally, Congress controls the purse strings of the U.S. military. No long term military campaign has ever been undertaken without the approval of Congress.
The fundamental issue is that the concept of domestic defense is increasingly becoming ridiculous. I don't know if you're one of the "militia" defense types, but you aren't shooting down a nuke, even one on a little cruise missile launched from an unmarked tuna boat, with a rifle. If we allow for more and more different players to get weapons like that the concept of mutually assured destruction ceases to exist, unless the US adopts a policy of building up enough nukes so that we can blast every nation on the planet just to make sure we got the one who attacked us. I'm not particularily fond of absorbing terror attacks and letting whoever is the most ruthless and violent gain control of much of the world where that sort of heavy handedness still works. Which is unfortunately still a lot of the world. I do wish those functions could be done by international alliances or the UN, and I think some thought should be given as to how to prod that sort of stuff along. Diplomacy is also very important. But ultimately we need that foreign presence. Though I do think we could have shifts between the amount of manpower vs the amount of drones and automated systems we have.
