Homeland Defense v. World Policeman

It is commonplace to argue that the United States should not be a world policeman.

This is a legitimate vision to hold for American foreign policy and military affairs. Many countries, for example, Mexico and India, hold that vision and act accordingly.

But if you genuinely believe that the United States should not be a world policeman, then you should translate your vision and values into your budgetary priorities.

The cost of providing the United States with homeland defense that is at least as solid as it is today, if not more so, if that is your sole predominant goal, is vastly less than what you United States spends today on its military.

The U.S. military budget, in round numbers, is about $750 billion a year. A U.S. military budget devoted to homeland defense as its predominant goal, could easily be 80% smaller, i.e. perhaps $150 billion a year or less, a savings of $600 billion a year ($6 trillion per ten year budget cycle) that could be devoted to other priorities: to reducing or eliminating budget deficits, to national infrastructure, to social programs and other domestic spending, to lower federal taxes, or to some combination of these alternatives.

Even for the limited goal of homeland defense, the U.S. military would still need some major expenditures to maintain its current standards. But the vast majority of the U.S. military budget is devoted to military resources that allow the U.S. to serve as a world policeman in foreign wars.

What Is Necessary For Homeland Defense?

The national guard and coast guard alone, are more than adequate to repel a military invasion from Mexico or Canada (as utterly unlikely as either scenario would be), to put down any domestic insurrection, and to control smuggling and piracy in U.S. waters.

The U.S. would still need to maintain a global system of military intelligence satellites. It would still need to maintain its strategic nuclear triad. It would still need a fleet of state of the art air to air combat aircraft so that it could always maintain air superiority in and near U.S. airspace since war is a winner take all scenario in which to be second best usually means to lose.

The prospect of an amphibious invasion of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Pacific Coasts of Washington State, Oregon, or California is laughably remote. The risk of such an amphibian invasion could be stymied even more definitively with sea patrol aircraft, like the P-8 in our current naval air fleet, and with diesel-electric coastal submarines, like those of many of our European allies, that are vastly less expansive than our large current fleet of nuclear attack submarines (which have never engaged in even a single combat engagement since the first one was purchased).

The notion of foreign forces trying to occupy, conquer, or rule and part of the lower 48 U.S. states with ground forces, perhaps arriving as paratroopers, is likewise laughably absurd, even with only the national guard and the coast guard available to deal with this invasion. No country has an army with capabilities remotely up to that task. Foreign tanks, mobile artillery, and armored personnel carriers will never appear in Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle, or San Diego, as they have this past week and a half in Ukraine.

U.S. territory in the Pacific is somewhat more vulnerable and would require some of the military forces housed in the Department of Defense to defend at current levels.

Alaska, which we purchased from Russia, is thinly populated. It is only about 5 minutes by supersonic jet fighter and only about an hour or two by fast warship, from Russian territory and to this day experiences occasional intrusions into its airspace by Russia warplanes. 

Guam, the Northern Mariana Island, and American Samoa have tiny populations and are closer to China than they are to the American mainland. 

Hawaii is the only part of U.S. territory that has been the subject of a serious military attack since the War of 1812, and Pearl Harbor lasted only a few hours on a single day in 1941 and was launched by a country that became our strong ally after we defeated it and occupied it.

None of these places have a land border with another country. There is no place from which an amphibious invasion of any of these places could be launched without ample advanced warning. None of these places have heavily populated areas that could be bombed with aircraft without at least enough warning to allow interceptor aircraft to be deployed and to warn the population centers facing imminent attack.

And, let's face it. The United States of America could survive an extended hostile foreign occupation of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, American Samoa, or part of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, although this would be an unwelcome act of war, without undue trauma. And, even those occupations would receive no sympathy or support from the local populations. So, while it is absolutely worth it to incur costs of substantial blood and treasure to defend those parts of U.S. territory, the fights necessary to defend them do not justify incurring any cost whatsoever.

The U.S. could satisfy all of its homeland defense needs without its fleet of aircraft carriers and their escorting surface combatants, with a small fraction of its attack submarine fleet, without the entire Marine Corps, with a fraction of its current Air Force, and with an Army adapted for a much narrower range of climates that is not designed to repel significant sized heavy, mechanized ground forces like tanks, mobile artillery batteries, and armored personnel carriers. The U.S. Army would also not need the same magnitude of expeditionary forces like its airborne divisions.

The United States would not need nearly as many troops in its standing Army, a military resource that the Founding Fathers were wary of and the President Eisenhower warned of the perils of having.

The U.S. could satisfy its homeland defense needs without foreign military bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, the U.K., Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Diego Garcia.

The Preferences Of The United States Revealed In Its Budget And Actions Shows A Unilateral Commitment To Being A World Policeman

The United States military's scope and resources are not consistent with these forced having predominant purpose of providing homeland defense. The lion's share of United States military spending is devoted to resources that are almost entirely for the purpose of serving as a "world policeman". Even those military resources that incidentally provide homeland defense benefits, like its attack submarine fleet and its network of military intelligence satellites, are predominantly used to carry out its world policeman actions.

The United States is bound by NATO treaty to join in the mutual defense of its NATO partners if any of them are invaded. But nothing in that treaty requires the U.S. to have European military bases, to maintain the world's largest navy by far to patrol the North Atlantic ocean's blue sea waters with little allied assistance, or to have any particular size of force available to deploy in the event that war breaks out in Europe. The NATO treaty obligation of the U.S. is formally and legally speaking not materially different than that of Canada or Denmark that routinely provide smaller contributions to multilateral military alliances because they are smaller countries.

The U.S. would not be shirking its legal obligations to its allies under binding treaties if it trimmed its expeditionary military forces in the U.S. Marine Corps and a substantial share of the U.S. Army, to a single expeditionary Army division, and closed all of its European military bases. 

Likewise, so far as I know, it is not obligated by treaty to maintain its military bases in South Korea and Japan, or to defend Taiwan, even though it has expressed an unequivocal intend to defend all three of them with military force. 

And, no treaty requires U.S. military forces to keep the Mediterranean Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean free from military and piracy threats to commerce, let alone, to do so at the primary expense of its own taxpayers, with only minimal foreign contributions.

The U.S. has no legal obligation to intervene in wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, as it has done repeatedly, with the possible exception of a legal, or at least overwhelming moral, obligation to defend Israel from its mostly extremely hostile neighbors - something that the U.S. has mostly done with foreign aid spending and arms sales, rather than with its own military forces.

Instead, in the Cold War era and beyond, the U.S. has unilaterally undertaken, by repeatedly authorizing the use of military force, by authorizing and maintaining foreign military bases, and by spending at least $600 billion a year of federal funds that it wouldn't have to spend on the purpose, the role of serving as a world policeman - protecting its allies and taking on violent threats to the world order.

Mostly, after World War II, the U.S. has devoted the resources its has devoted to its military to resist advances from Communist or former Communist regimes abroad, and from militant Islamist revolutionaries (sometimes as insurgents and sometimes as sovereign or claimed sovereign states) abroad.

The response to Islamist  forces, that can be traced back at least to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iran and Lebanon in the late 1970s and the 1980s, has been justified politically primarily as a response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, which resulted in one major attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and a few minor attacks with less than a twentieth of the impact. 

Those military engagements have had mixed success, but have been, when compared to the scale of the American military and its economy, "small wars", which while not cheap, have also not involved massive numbers of deaths for U.S. forces, a military draft, or a total national economic commitment. Also, the U.S. could certainly have chosen to make more limited and isolated responses to terrorism related threats, particularly following 9-11, than it ended up taking.

Even our Cold War and post-Cold War efforts to respond militarily to Communist and post-Communist regimes have been a story of mixed successes. 

The U.S. saved half of Korea from a horrible fate in the Korean War, but lost the other half of it which has been one of the worst and most dangerous regimes in the world and has a few nuclear weapons and long term missiles. The U.S. ultimately lost the Vietnam War, and related conflicts in Cambodia and Laos. In the long run, Hong Kong and Macau were peacefully restored to the control of Communist China and have not maintained the autonomy that made these city-states thrive since then. The U.S. was not successful at preventing one party totalitarian regimes from arising in most of the Middle East and much of Africa. The U.S. did not manage to prevent East Germany and almost all of Eastern Europe from becoming communist tributary states of the Soviet Union who were part of the Warsaw Pact under Soviet duress and sometimes overt military action until the fall of the Soviet Union, over the strong objections of its and its NATO allies.

The U.S. was not successful in wresting Cuba from its communist regime. The U.S. anti-communist interventions in Latin America in the Cold War period and beyond were mostly either unsuccessful or gave rise to equally bad or worse hard right, neo-fascist regimes.

The U.S. response to global Islamism, and to a lesser extent, even to Communism, has also been inconsistent.

It has formed secure, if shallow, alliances with oil rich monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In part, due to oil wealth, but also to protect Israel, the U.S. has provided military and other foreign aid to a one party state in Egypt and to Saudi Arabia's absolute monarchy. The U.S. tolerated communist leanings in Mexico and Venezuela and Libya, because of their oil and gas wealth. 

The regimes that the U.S. and its allies put in place after invading Afghanistan (in response to 9-11) and after twice invading Iraq (the first time in response to Iraq's invasion of the oil rich, slave holding monarchy of Kuwait, and the second time based upon false reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction it planned to used for terrorist style attacks), had Islam as the established national religion and Islamic law as the supreme legal authority.

Conclusion

The U.S. through its national budget and history of military action has shown a strong unilateral commitment that continues to this day to being a world policeman.

Other nations in the world, moreover, have retreated from world policing activity and declined to form international institutions to do so, to a great extent in reliance on the fact that the U.S. is doing so.

There has been a long running American experiment in serving as a world policeman. It was begun shortly after its founding in its deployment of naval forces and marines to Tripoli in the Mediterranean sea against the Barbary Pirates. It continued prior to World War II, mostly in a Latin American and Caribbean sphere of influence, on the high seas, and in the later part of World War I. World War II was more than that and the U.S. was brought into involuntarily with attacks on Pearl Harbor and U.S. ships that made this more than a world policeman operation. But this American experiment continued, refocused, and dramatically expanded after World War II in the Cold War, in resistance to militant Islamism starting in the late 1970s, and in post-Cold War conflicts.

There is a legitimate argument to be made that the American experiment in serving as a world policeman has demonstrated that this policy has been, on balance, unwise, despite the facts that it has had successes in addition to failures, and that the U.S. should retreat from this role.

But at the moment, the preferences of U.S. policymakers revealed by their actions make unequivocally clear that the U.S. has voluntarily and unilaterally stepped up to and taken the role of being a world policeman on behalf of Western-style developed, non-communist nations around the world.

So, at this juncture, it is dishonest, unseemly and cowardly, for the U.S. to retreat from defending Ukraine and other non-NATO targets of Russian military aggression on the grounds that the United States is not a world policeman. 

The U.S. has accepted the duty of being a world policeman for reasons having nothing to do with its formal treaty obligations and it is now its obligation to do so to the best of its ability. 

If it cannot, because it fears a Russian nuclear attack on it, it should say forthrightly that it is shirking the responsibilities its has assumed as a world policeman because of this fear for its own people's safety. But it should not try to pretend that it didn't sign up for this job and assume responsibility for global security.

If the U.S. can't take adequate action in the face of such a bald Russian attack on Ukraine in flagrant violation of international law and all norms of decency, because its people have lost the resolve to have the U.S. serve as a world policeman, however, it should promptly dramatically overhaul its military force, should overhaul its base structure, and should disabuse its international allies of any expectations that they had previously formed based upon the assumption that the U.S. would protect them and the world geopolitical order.

The rest of the world shouldn't be left with false hopes of U.S. support that it has no intention of honoring, and the U.S. people shouldn't have to bear the exorbitant cost of perhaps $600 billion a year (about $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States and about 3% of the U.S. GDP) to create a mere façade of a willingness to use the resources it has purchased with those funds for their only available and intended purpose. The hypocritical status quo is indefensible.