A Post-Cold War Military

So the NYT has the latest story in a debate stretching back to the Clinton administration about the desirability of continuing to fund the F-22. In brief, the argument goes something like this: the US armed forces are tasked with being able to fight anyone, anytime, anywhere, and they need constantly improving weapons systems to do that. No one disputes the that the F-22 is an engineering marvel, easily the most capable combat aircraft on the planet. It's also the most expensive, which segues nicely into the counterargument: the Soviet Union, the entity this aircraft was designed to defeat, no longer exists, and no force worthy of this sort of performance has emerged to take its place. In fact, setting aside the possibilities of future wars, the two existing ones we have require low-cost people skills and redevelopment work more than they require supersonic, radar-invisible fighter aircraft.

The Bush administration inherited this debate, and through a combination of deficit spending and policy neglect, never bothered to resolve it. The Bush Doctrine was entirely about foreign policy, not how we expect the military to implement it. While our troops in Iraq called out for armored vehicles and more personnel, we continued to spend billions on air superiority fighters, missile defense systems, and a new generation of nuclear weapons. I don't mean to suggest that these programs have no use. Our existing aircraft are three decades old and in need of replacement. New nuclear weapons tend to be smaller, which is at least something. But they do little to address the immediate needs of the troops actually fighting right now. Even if we do decide that, somehow, we can afford to build a military machine simultaneously geared toward to anti-insurgency work, and fighting a major land war in Europe, let's hope the Obama administration at least has the ability to articulate that vision. Or some other vision- anything. It is well past time to address the sense, creeping since 1991, that we are getting a military geared as much toward keeping production contracts in all the right congressional districts as it is toward implementing national security policy.