Transitions Followup I

One of my friends, Jeff Haemer, sent me an email with some useful comments about my Transitions post. He was going to post it to the comments section, but Blogger didn't like it.

Rethinking our troop deployments makes good sense, and we keep doing that, but I think there are a few problems with the solution you propose.

First, the primary role of the military is prophylactic. If we weren't a world power (these days, *the* world power), stakes would be different. Today, doing away with world-wide deployment would be like removing the police from Boulder because it isn't a high-crime area. Guess what would become a high-crime area.You might not like the idea that we have become "the world's policeman," but here we are.

Second, deployment takes time. Civilians often underestimate just how big a deal it was to handle the logistics for the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan.Having feet on the ground in the neighborhood of potential hot-spots is integral to our military strategy. We're not physically or politically isolated enough to avoid this reality in the XXIth century, and our intelligence isn't good enough to let us predict where those spots will be with as much precision as we'd like.

Third, the military isn't a police force (despite the phrase "world's police"). The USMC is a truly great military unit. I can't top the quote I use in Uncommon Valor Was a Common Virtue.

But we're no better at being Barney Fife than we are at being Fred Astaire or Marcus Welby. If we spend more money on the border patrol and less on the military, that's one thing, but "scratch out machine gun and write in typewriter," as someone says in M*A*S*H, won't work.

I'm glad Jeff made these comments; it's made me rethink my position. I will probably move this step to much later in the overall plan, probably phase 3 or 4, and make some changes as well because I see that this step is dependent on having a world that is more free.