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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (1532)	1/19/2001 3:17:11 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 82486

Quickly overwhelming a possible threat is not necessarily the best way to deal with a possible threat. In many cases it is not even remotely practical: we could spend enough to bankrupt ourselves, for example, and still not be able to overwhelm China. That isn't a problem, though, because we don't need to overwhelm China. 1 - The threat here would be what China could do not China's existance as a nation. We should be able to quickly overwhelm a Chinese threat (if it is practical to do so I'm not saying that we should have trillion dollar defense budgets if that was needed to protect Taiwain), that doesn't mean we would have to be able to quickly ovewhelm China itself. 2 - I didn't even say we should automatically spend enough to be able to quickly overcome all possible threats. I merely said that, that was the level beyond which additional spending would be a waste. I can quite easily imagine a level of spending which would not be wasteful but would still be too high to be a good idea. anyone who has looked seriously at the Chinese logistic capabilities agrees that China can deploy and support only a tiny fraction of its forces outside its territory. Of course this reality is missed completely by those who cite the size of the Chinese armed forces as a compelling reason for greater American military spending. China has little capability to deploy conventional forces outside of its territory, but that capability is rising and is enough to present some threat to countries close to China. It also has nuclear weapons and long range balistic missles. Is the military power of the US vastly superior? Yes, but that does not stop China from being a growing potential threat. Military spending has to be scaled to probable missions and possible threats, and I don't see any reason why it needs to be expanded (or reduced) at this time. I would only be in favor of a fairly small increase and that only because of the reductions in recents years. I think the current plans for drastic increases would be, if implemented, a waste of money. What current plans for drastic increases? Tim