Not too long ago, T76 asked how you would trim the DOD budget if you were in charge. On NRO today, a former Reagan administration ASD offers his suggestions, and a rebuttal to a critic. One passage troubles me:
“We recommend cutting the Army and Marine Corps back to their pre-Afghanistan-and-Iraq levels when we withdraw from those theaters because, as Secretary of Defense Gates noted in the May/June 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, “the United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Iraq and Afghanistan anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire.”
“We also recommend reducing the Navy’s fleet to 230 ships and argue that this can be done by reducing the number of aircraft carriers from eleven to nine (something that Secretary Gates has also suggested), reducing the number of strategic ballistic submarines (as recommended by the Air Force personnel mentioned above), and changing the size and frequency of deployments (an option presented by the Navy’s think tank, the Center for Naval Analyses).”
I get what he’s saying, but it sounds like wishful thinking to me. What say you?
