What role for the military?

The Hill is reporting that most Presidential candidates are planning to increase baseline defense spending in their first budget. I wonder how much of this decision is base political pandering and how much is related to a belief that the US military should or will be used for other sustained expeditionary invasions and occupations. I am hoping that this is mainly pandering to the resource extraction areas of the economy and nation.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) are the two Democrats who openly discuss cutting the defense budget, according to a survey conducted by The Hill.

Unlike many Democrats who ran for the White House before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, most of the 2008 Democratic candidates say they are planning to build a robust military.

At a time when they are being criticized by the GOP for seeking to withdraw troops from Iraq, most of the Democratic candidates have adopted aggressive stances on growing the military. These White House hopefuls say they want to spend much more money on troops at every level....

Nevertheless, faced with the sobering reality of overstretched ground forces and an ever-expanding list of war-torn equipment, the majority of 2008 Republican and Democratic White House candidates promise to pour resources into repairing and restoring the military.

Most of the candidates, with some notable exceptions, agree that the size of U.S. ground forces should be bolstered.

The Bush administration earlier this year announced plans to augment the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps by 27,000.

Democratic frontrunners Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are among those who support an increase in the size of ground forces.

The next four to eight years will see very little marginal money available for anything. The big pools of money that might become available are from increased tax revenue due to the sunsetting of the Bush tax shifts, and any money that is freed up from the $120 billion a year that is being spent in Iraq. Medicare Part D inefficiencies are off the table due to previous Democratic inaction towards a serious drug price negotiation strategy. And that is about it for where resources are available to do anything different if we assume the deficit will not be targeted to get any larger.

I have to wonder what value we are getting for half a trillion dollars a year in defense spending. We have a system that is vastly over-capable of defeating traditional second and third generation warfare model nation-state forces and very few scenarios where this capability is needed. We have a system that can dominate blue water lanes of communication and seize control of brown water areas. We have a system that is still being optimized for an updated version of World War Two.

We also have a system that is completely incapable of fighting effectively a fourth generation opponent. The question remains whether or not we as a nation-state should seek to offensively engage against fourth generation opponents instead of standing on the strategic defensive, rebuild our alliances and reformulate the international and transnational rule sets that have served us well for the past sixty years.

By precluding the possibility of reducing the DoD budget, the Presidential candidates are precluding the possibility of rethinking our foreign policy mindset past the point of restoring basic competence and also reducing the domestic policy option space.