Something's gotta give. We can't afford such a military anymore, a military that seems to exist mostly to insure the continued flow of oil to the U.S.

Too bad we have done nothing to kick the oil addiction.

I agree with a military budget cut, but cutting land based forces is silly, one does not win battles with gadgets. People win the battles. Unfortunately, congress makes more money keeping shipyards and airplane manufactures in business rather than having more people in uniform. Cut some aircraft carriers, cut the Joint Strike fighter, which costs a million dollars an hour to fly. We are involved in a war in which the opposition uses hand held rockets, 60-year-old rifles and homemade bombs, and we are at a stalemate. Big ships cannot win a war like this, people do. Keep the people and scrap the hardware…..

When what was later understood to be the American Empire emerged at the tail end of the 19th century, the debate was ultimately won by those leaders such as Benjamin Tracy and Theodore Roosevelt who believed that a strong Navy was the key to American strength and leadership in the world. In crises going as far back as the Barbary Wars and the crisis with France during John Adams' presidency, the Navy, and not the Army, was essential to outcomes favorable to the United States.

In the Cold War era, President Eisenhower recognized that NATO could never match the Soviet bloc in a land war fought over Germany. That, together with a desire to hold down the skyrocketing military budget, convinced Ike to rely on nuclear weapons and the intelligence apparatus. During the Vietnam War, a conflict in which American interests were questionable at best, a large ground deployment failed to protect the South from takeover by the Communist North. Nixon and Kissinger believed that American interests would be best served by avoiding similar conflicts in the future and conducted foreign policy that was more oriented toward great power diplomacy and less toward the Domino Theory.

In the post-Cold War years, American foreign policy was thrown disastrously off course by two more major ground wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, without objectives that were clear, attainable, and squarely in the national interest. Despite his campaign opposition to the Iraq War, Obama has thus far found escape from Afghanistan as difficult as Nixon found escape from Vietnam, and he has failed to articulate a clear vision of what American strategic interests are and what kind of military will attain them.

I must respectfully disagree with seattlelifer's comments. Large armies are for the Caesers and Napoleons of the world; American interests have historically been best served by the Navy, unconventional forces, and so-called "soft power", and so it will remain in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, TVD muddies an otherwise worthwhile piece on the need to reorder our military priorities with his obsession and misleading statements about our vital social insurance programs. First, while he and other deficit obsessives keep warning that the world will stop seeing U.S. bonds as a safe investment, Treasury bond rates remain at very low levels, indicating the rest of the world isn't worried at this time. We do need to address the long-term deficit, but a big part of that is something TVD doesn't mention -- restoring our currently shrunken tax revenues to historically supportable levels. The irresponsible Bush tax cuts, two wars, the unpaid-for Medicare drug benefit package, and the financial system robbery/collapse is what got us into this fiscal hole far more than increases in social insurance spending. Let's restore progressive taxation on wealthy Americans and corporations, eliminate or reform tax breaks (including following the sensible Simpson-Bowles proposal on the mortgage interest deduction), reorder and cut military spending, and implement the cost-saving changes in the 2010 health care reform law as quickly as possible. Out-of-control health care spending increases, one of the biggest drags on the U.S. economy, can only be addressed by bringing down the cost of health care across the system -- not by shifting costs to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security beneficiaries, most of whom can't afford those costs. As I've said before, TVD needs to get out there and talk to real, live Medicare beneficiaries and see how close to the bone their budgets before advocating major cost-shifting to them. That will not reduce health care costs.

What is clear from both the article and comments is that the military needs to be cut, but there has been no clear planning used to determine the level of military spending required. Everyone has a different idea and a different reason for the cuts. In a rational process the military would develop a plan by assessing the various risks that we face now and in the future, determining which ones we want to defend against and which ones we want to ignore. Then we can determine what troop levels we need and what level of equipment and equipment development we need. When that is in place we can develop a budget in line with our national defense requirements. It appears we are going about this by determining what the budget is and then letting the various services fight over how big a piece of the pie each gets. If this was conducted in a rational way it would be clear to all what our strategy is. This is another example of a commander in chief that has no idea how to run the military or an organization.
When that constitution states clearly that it is the function of the federal government to provide national defense it seems strange to start the budget cuts with the military and ignore social security and rest of the welfare system which have no constitutional mandate. I’m sure this happens because the military follows a chain of command structure and they will follow orders given by the commander, even if they disagree, as opposed to the congress that just wants to buy their votes with our tax dollars and therefore never deal with the tough issues. I’m sure one of the topics that will come under fire will be the fact that the military can retire after 20 years at half pay. Before they reduce or eliminate this military benefit they should eliminate the congressional benefit of receiving full retirement at 62 after serving only 5 years.

Pepper and Harris - well written! Magellan - I appreciate your perspective on what motivates Congress - though disagree on your blanket statement re: "no idea".

Good article, overall! Clearly, some realignment needs to take place between our reach (ambitions) and our capabilities (ability to fund and execute). It's great to see some informed discourse regarding what changes need to be made and how to make them; as opposed to denying the need to make changes at all.

Van Dyk: "Kennedy was forced to mobilize on short notice 150,000 Army Reservists"

My memory is on thin ice here, but I do not recall the Reservists and Guard back then being recalled again and again, as they are now and apparently would continue to be. The U.S. has never been totally frank about its engagement objectives, the reason being to either keep the public in line or distract it back into line. It feels like that is getting harder to do, which would be a sign of progress. Time will tell.

Thanks for your comments on an issue which deserves more serious debate than it probably will receive. A couple responses to your comments:

---pepper 2000 is correct that we traditionally have relied on air and sea power, and technology, to project American power and defend our vital interests. We have been drawn into ground wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan but, in truth, only the Korean intevention could be justified on a traditional vital-interest basis. Even there, Secretary of State Dean Acheson might have invited the North Korean aggression by stating publicly that the Korean Peninsula did not lie within the U.S. defense perimeter. We necessarily maintained large ground forces in Europe to deter Soviet/Warsaw Pact aggression but that mission no longer exists and NATO partners can provide their own ground forces. Yes, we need ground forces, but not in the number and mix presently existing.

---Our $15 trillion and rising federal debt burden is, of and by itself, a threat to our national security. The cornerstone of that security is our financial and economic stability. It is quite true that international investors continue to buy U.S. Treasuries, seeing them as a safe haven in a time of uncertainty. But, as our debt further deepens and we are perceived as unwilling to deal with it, it will be seen as no different than that of any other country under financial duress. The Chinese are our largest creditors and could weaken us greatly at any time by dumping U.S. debt from their portfolio.

Yes, some Pentagon spending reductions will be necessary. But we cannot pretend that Social Security and Medicare programs can be exempt from change. I've written before about the moderate, incremental changes that could put both programs on sounder financial footing. With the retirement of the baby boomers, too many Social Security/Medicare beneficiaries are being financed by too few working-age Americans. Of course I know personally about these programs. I served in the Johnson White House when Medicare was created (with far more modest benefits than at present) and
have received both SS and Medicare payments since age 65. No one in 1965, when Medicare (and Medicaid) became law, foresaw the expansions of benefits
and dramatic demographic shifts which would take place in the intervening years.

--This proposal emerged from a considered assessment of the changed international situation and the kind of defense establishment needed to meet it. Necessarily, it involves spending reductions. My only surprise was that it was released in isolation, without wide prior consultation with
congressional and other leaders concerned with defense policy, and at the beginning of a national-election year in which it will be difficult to
discuss defense in anything but the broadest-brush terms. There is never a good time to take up such difficult issues but this one is especially not good. Obviously the administration felt it had no choice as to timing.

---Yes, Reserve and National Guard activations have become quite frequent and routine in recent years. The large 1961 mobilization came during what was seen as an existential crisis, with the possiblity looming of war in central Europe. Remember that, in 1961, there also was a military draft to feed the military's longer-term need for personnel. Since President Nixon's abolition of the draft, during the Vietnam War era, an all-volunteer force, including Reserve and Guard forces, has been the sole source of personnel.

Actually, TVD, despite my repeated prodding, has never laid out his ideas for controlling the growth of Medicare other than to say something like both Republicans and Democrats know and agree on the solutions, which is simply not true. I cover this regularly, and I can tell you there is very sharp disagreement on this. People who empirically study health policy, as opposed to policy ideologues, will tell you that shifting lots more costs to seniors, which is what TVD seems to suggest we do, will not solve the nation's Medicare or health care cost problems. While the Medicare population has grown, the overall cost of health care has grown considerably faster, and that's the big challenge, not the growth of the senior population. TVD also has been extremely coy in talking about what most experts say has to be at least part of the solution to the long-term Social Security shortfall -- raising the earnings cap for the payroll tax. Still, Social Security needs only modest adjustments to come into balance, whereas controlling overall health care spending (you can't control just Medicare spending) will require bigger and tougher changes, for which the Affordable Care Act is a major first step. TVD also fails to acknowledge that getting Americans back to work and the U.S. economy back on a growth trajectory would make a huge dent in the deficit problem, even without any revenue increases or spending cuts. Overall, TVD would have been better advised to keep his focus on reordering military spending rather than getting into this broader spending debate. Each area has its own huge policy and political complications.

Harris Meyer is clearly not looking for dialogue but for a place to vent his continuing anger and hostility. He can figure out where it's coming from.

I have written about entitlement spending on numerous occasions and suggested specific ways it can be brought into check without undue hardship on seniors. (Of course, the greatest hardship on seniors would to have these programs collapse because they no longer could be sustained financially).

For a number of years there has been rough consensus among many examining these issues on a mix of measures which could do the job. Those most often proposed: Raise the eligibility age modestly, since life expectancy has expanded since the programs' inception. Lift the lid on Fed/FICA earnings subject to withholding, which would cause upper-income taxpayers to make greater contributions and also add substantially to the revenue base. Make more modest COLA adjustments annually. On Medicare, which is under greatest immediate pressure, new deductibles additionally could be instituted. It remains to be seen what cost savings can be generated by the Obama health plan. It made some immediately by cutting several-hundred million dollars from Medicare and passing massive Medicaid obligations to the states. Yet some independent estimates indicate it will deepen rather than reduce annual federal deficits. Its central provision, which I support---that is, the so-called "individual mandate" on citizens to obtain health coverage---may or may not be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Yes, economic growth will generate greater tax revenues and help us reduce dcficits and debt. But we cannot "grow ourselves" out of our current hole, even with a strong upward growth trend---which is not in sight, near term, given the constraints placed on it by our public and private debt burdens. So, like it or not, we must reduce debt by taking steps on defense, entitlement spending, and discretionary spending. We also should
remove "tax expenditures" (i.e., loopholes and preferences) from the tax code not only to stimulate economic growth but to broaden the federal revenue base. I have made these points, here and elsewhere, frequently.

Contrary to what Meyer apparently thinks, I've had a lifetime of involvement in national economic, tax, financial, and domestic (including health) issues as well as the foreign policy/national security issues discussed in this article. My views are not formed carelessly or out of ignorance. I welcome comments disagreeing with those views from persons having either great or minimal knowledge of the subject matter, so long as they are trying to add constuctively to discussion. But personal insults and boilerplate rhetoric waste the time of everyone, including the person making them.

TVD still has not responded to my requests for him to detail how he would control overall health care spending as well as Medicare spending, and he still hasn't even detailed how he would control Medicare spending except now he says he would add new and higher deductibles (Medicare already has high deductibles, and seniors already pay large premiums to private Medigap insurers to cover those deductibles, with their total out-of-pocket health spending consuming about 15% of their income, significantly higher than the general population). He continues to ignore the expert consensus that Medicare and Medicaid costs cannot be truly controlled without controlling costs in the broader U.S. health care system. Of course you can shift massive costs onto seniors and the poor, which is what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last year said the budget blueprint proposed by Republican Paul Ryan and passed by the House along party lines would do. You can read my article and many other articles on this:
http://managedhealthcareexecutive.modernmedicine.com/mhe/News+Analysis/Ryan-pushes-defined-contribution-for-Medicare/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/724487
And this Kaiser Family Foundation study shows how counterproductive it would be to raise the Medicare eligibility age, as TVD proposes:
http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/8169.pdf
Also, the CBO projected that the Affordable Care Act would reduce the federal budget deficit in a variety of ways. And, contrary to what TVD says, the ACA has the federal government picking up the cost of the Medicaid expansion, not shifting it to the states.
I've been covering health policy as a journalist for nearly 30 years (though I never met Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey) and I can tell you there is absolutely no consensus between Republicans and Democrats on how to control either overall health care spending or Medicare and Medicaid spending. There is agreement among conservatives that market competition will do the job. But even health policy experts who favor competition, like former OMB director Alice Rivlin, whom I recently interviewed, have doubts about that (there is no strong evidence that competition holds down health care costs). There is agreement among Democrats and mainstream health policy experts that stronger regulation, perhaps along with highly regulated competition a la the Affordable Care Act, is the best solution. The reality is this is a ideologically polarized issue, and where you come down depends on your values and your vision of American politics, society, economics, and justice (should all Americans receive comprehensive, affordable, high quality health care or should care be rationed by price and wealth). Invoking some kind of magical bipartisan centrist solution, as TVD does, is pure fantasy. There ain't none.
Unlike TVD, I made no personal insults to him in these or my previous comments. But I will say that it's unbecoming for him or anyone to constantly cite career history as authority for arguments. Much better to cite current, convincing evidence and present compelling arguments based on that evidence. There are Nobel Prize winners who have made fools of themselves by presenting themselves as experts on matters outside their realm of expertise. Why don't we try a difference approach?

HM's "magical bipartisan centrist solution" exists today exactly as it always has, and what is truly magical about it is how easily trivial debate by parties that basically pursue the same pro-corporate policies regardless of formal differences and debate successfully cons, tunes out, and turns off the U.S. public. See Congress's own health plan for a fine example of "socialism for the rich." In Chomsky's phrasing, "really existing free market doctrine" is "market discipline good for you, but not for me." Formal electoral democracy has proven itself eloquently effective at marginalizing activism and diverting the public from information and access necessary for actual participation.

HM's correctly assesses "Medicare +Medigap" as far as he goes. What he overlooks or is unaware of is the rapidly growing list of doctors no longer taking Medicare patients— check the online listing of affiliates & specialists for any of the area's major health "systems," e.g., Swedish— a direct, but inhumane way of sending D. C. a message.

HM's "stronger regulation, perhaps along with highly regulated competition" would have to tackle what Paul Krugman, allegedly in a sane moment over a decade ago, referred to as "bad ideas that may not serve expressed goals."

And after that what a WSJ letter writer today referred to as "virtually no effective quality standards for laws, lawmaking and regulations and no quality assurance standards to weed out laws that no longer provide a positive net benefit to the citizenry, and no quality improvement programs to improve the problem-solving efficacy of laws. The result of the lack of quality is that the bodies of laws and regulations continue to grow in size, cost and complexity while societal problems remain mostly unsolved."

And after that some means of preserving universal quality standards so that ignoramuses don't purge them in the name of progress—generally par for the course now, although NEPA and SEPA, for instance, are decidedly this side of universal standards.

Like many emeritus politicians and political operatives, TVD's opinions in moving forward in time are shaped by their experiences at the time they were active in politics and are furthermore clouded by the passage of time. So when we evaluate TVD's comments we need to take this into consideration.

This comment for example should be questioned:

"Defense spending is another matter, moving in another direction yet still a heavy burden. During the Cold War period about 50 percent of our federal budget, and 10 percent of our national income, routinely went to the Pentagon. By 2010, the percentages were 20 percent of federal spending and 5 percent of national income."

While it is true that through the 1960s and most of the 1970s that defense spending was 10% of GDP, it had fallen to 5% of GDP by the time Carter was president and Reagan seemed to have found out how to cripple the communist block by raising the percentage to about 6% GDP.

In hindsight, we can view the expenses on defense in the 1960s and 1970s as utterly foolish. In the 1950s, we were told there was a bomber gap to justify high military expenditures. Upon the fall of the Soviet Union, it was found that the gap did not exist. Later, we were told that there was a missile-gap with the Soviet Union to justify the thousands of nuclear warheads and the triad of submarine, bomber, and missile delivery vehicles. It also did not exist once data was obtained.

The Vietnam war was predicated on the domino theory and our involvement and 50,000 American lives were spent when the reality was that it was a war for national unity. Later, Reagan and his team promoted the concept of the Soviet Union first strike capability. And thus began the folly of the Star Wars program. Also not true when the data was obtained.

President George W. Bush learning from history was able to justify a debacle in Iraq by manipulating suspect intelligence to promote invasion based upon the belief of WMDs.

And now rather than enjoying some type of peace dividend, TVD defends a budget that spends 4.5% of our national wealth when our closest economic competitors (e.g. Europe, China) spend no more than 2.5% of their national wealth. The US military industrial complex needs to manufacture threats to justify this excessive level of spending. Thus we see saber rattling with regards to North Korea who is nothing more than an isolated country without resources or allies. And we see saber rattling with regards to Iran where US messaging and posturing only serves to provide that regime with all the justification that is needed to remain in power.

We have anti-missile facilities in Alaska that serve no purpose, and are proceeding to install others in the Czech Republic with the totally expected response from Russia that reminds one of cold war rhetoric.

And with the rise of China, it is predicable that the US military industrial complex believe that they need to manufacture a threat with America's largest trading partner.

And yet, this budget does nothing to address probably a greater threat to American security which is the rising violence in Mexico that has claimed 47,000 lives over the past 5 years (roughly the same number as American lives lost in Vietnam).

May I remind TVD of what President Eisenhower stated:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Thanks, Pythagoras, for your incisive comments. Getting back to my comment about the lack of evidence for Rommey's and the Republicans' competition model reducing health care costs or improving quality, here's an excellent presentation of the expert view on this, and on the need to instead consider stronger regulatory measures:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/23/2/8.full.html