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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (2388)	10/13/2000 11:18:37 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

I don't think we need a much larger force, but we should increase force readyness and probably air lift and rapid sealift capabilites. I would not call for a big increase in the defence budget, but I would not support any more cuts. I can agree with that. I think most of what needs to be done could be accomplished by reallocation of funds within the defence budget. As Ron has correctly pointed out, we need less brass and more steel. I also think that we should seriously consider an across-the-board cut in strategic nuclear forces. If we decommissioned the oldest third of our strategic bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and ICBMs, we could save a large sum of maintenance money without significantly impairing our deterrent capacity. The old calculus of comparing total numbers of warheads just isn't valid any more (if it ever was); accuracy, reliability, and survivability are far more important than total numbers. There is nothing we can do with 3000 warheads that we couldn't do as well with 2000. The old argument that a pre-emptive first strike requires multiple warheads targeted on each silo is also obsolete: we aren't even contemplating such a strike, and we know now that a nuclear strike at that level anywhere in the world would probably have macro-environmental effects that would be catastrophic for us, and which would outweigh any conceivable advantage. Even if we could take out the land-based Russian missiles (no other country has enough of them to make the comparison relevant) in a single strike, there is no assurance that we could quickly enough or thoroughly enough to avoid a devastating counterstrike. They have ballistic missile submarines, and we cannot guarantee that they would not launch on warning. The entire idea is too absurd to consider. We will never do it, and we don't need all those warheads for anything else. There is a lot of emotional resistance to reduction of strategic forces, but there is no need to base budget decisions on emotion. It also needs to be pointed out that the readiness and deployability issue is affected dramatically by diplomacy and by our attitude toward other countries and regional strategic alliances. If we maintain a healthy respect for multilateralism, and if our allies are convinced that we are not a pack of gung-ho cowboys who might go it alone at any moment, we will have a much easier time maintaining the forward basing rights we need to be able to deploy forces quickly. Many Americans have a visceral dislike for the kind of constraints imposed by multilateral agreements and organizations, but they are a critical part of the modern strategic landscape. We also need to pay a little more attention to the need to regulate the off-base behaviour of troops deployed abroad, which has already cost us our forward bases in the Philippines and put our basing rights in Japan in jeopardy. We can't expect other countries to host our forces if our soldiers run around raping local girls. more and more countries are developing nuclear weopons and ballistic missle technology. I don't see how proliferation cancels out the efficiency of MAD. MAD works because it employs the most basic of all human instincts: self-preservation. Hard to do much better than that.