{"id":96427,"date":"2016-10-06T07:47:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T11:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=96427"},"modified":"2016-10-06T06:48:17","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T10:48:17","slug":"how-do-we-fight-the-forever-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2016\/10\/how-do-we-fight-the-forever-war\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do We Fight the \u201cForever War\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
October 6, 2016<\/div>
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By WallStreetDaily.com<\/u><\/a> \"How<\/p>\n

War isn\u2019t always combat on a battlefield \u2014 not when the battlefield is everywhere, all the time.<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n

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For better or worse \u2014 and like it or not \u2014 the United States has been the most dominant power the world has ever seen.<\/p>\n

Say what you will about our spiraling federal debt, including the off-the-books stuff.<\/p>\n

And yeah, the budget deficit \u2014 if Congress ever gets around to passing a new spending bill \u2014 is something to behold.<\/p>\n

For all the drama it generates, our domestic strife \u2014 including \u201cculture wars,\u201d identity politics, and the battle for social justice and equality \u2014 is but a distraction to our real business these days.<\/p>

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That business is empire.<\/p>\n

According to the budget-and-deficit scolds at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the United States spends more on defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined.<\/p>\n

A former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, replying to a question on Quora, \u201cHow much stronger is the United States military as compared with the next strongest power?\u201d answered, \u201c1,000 times. Maybe more.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cNo other military or combination of militaries could even begin to inflict the slightest numbers of casualties on the United States military in a conventional war.\u201d<\/p>\n

China, our No. 2 \u201crival\u201d in defense spending, with outlays equal to about a third of ours, defines its six theaters of command entirely within the bounds of its borders.<\/p>\n

For all the drama it generates, our domestic strife \u2014 including \u201cculture wars,\u201d identity politics, and the battle for social justice and equality \u2014 is but a distraction to our real business these days.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

U.S. theaters of command span the globe.<\/p>\n

We stepped into a vacuum created by the destruction of World War II.<\/p>\n

During the Cold War, we knitted the world together based on our self-interest, which was to expand markets and to extend our moat of security.<\/p>\n

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department established economic principles that we know as the \u201cWashington Consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n

And thus the \u201cPax Americana\u201d was born.<\/p>\n

U.S. theaters of command span the globe.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the post-9\/11 era, we\u2019ve traded \u2014 if not explicitly then certainly implicitly through our choices at the ballot box \u2014 personal liberty for national security. So we\u2019ve evolved from the skepticism of standing armies to the fear of threats from abroad.<\/p>\n

And Congress \u2014 a body thought by the Framers closest to the people and therefore most protective of its liberties \u2014 through the years, decades, and centuries, has learned how to use its constitutional power to \u201craise and support Armies\u201d and \u201cprovide and maintain a Navy\u201d not only to prop up a permanent a military but to aggrandize themselves in the bargain.<\/p>\n

War has come a long way since 1789. And we\u2019ve been there almost every step of the way, benefitting from ancient European rivalries and conflicts to the extent that we got to pick up the pieces after the two great wars of the first half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmpire\u201d does not, however, necessarily mean \u201cinertia.\u201d And our national security and defense experts continue to innovate in order to meet threats old and new.<\/p>\n

After all, we know from Sun Tzu that \u201cthe art of war is of vital importance to the state\u201d and that \u201cevery battle is won before it\u2019s ever fought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the Cold War has long since given way to the Global War on Terror, it is that once-and-future Great Power Russia that is again proving itself a \u201cpacing competitor\u201d in the eternal game of global domination.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s recent military incursions in Ukraine and Syria suggest the U.S. has some gaps to fill, particularly when it comes to cyber and electronic warfare, if it\u2019s to maintain operational and tactical superiority.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s very different concept of cyber espionage \u2014 where there\u2019s no distinction between peacetime and wartime \u2014 also requires a new, round-the-clock footing.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmpire\u201d does not, however, necessarily mean \u201cinertia.\u201d And our national security and defense experts continue to innovate in order to meet threats old and new.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

While the political branch of the mainstream media got its gears up for the one and only vice presidential debate of the 2016 campaign on Tuesday, the Association of the United States Army held is annual conference in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cthe biggest defense conference of the year\u201d \u2014 prom for national security professionals.<\/p>\n

There, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work endorsed a future of \u201cmultidomain battle\u201d fought in the air, on land, at sea, in space, and in cyberspace.<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cThis isn\u2019t about Skynet and Terminator. This is about Ironman.\u201d That\u2019s a pithy and dramatic assessment, though I don\u2019t get the distinction.<\/p>\n

It does, however, illustrate the remote, fantastical endeavor \u2014 at least relative to most Americans \u2014 that modern warfare has become.<\/p>\n

Remote and fantastical, sure, but can it too be more efficient?<\/p>\n

According to Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., of Breaking Defense, \u201cEven as the U.S. defense budget shrinks, the Army\u00a0is prioritizing new investments in downing drones, hacking networks, jamming transmissions, and even sinking ships at sea. Far from triggering interservice rivalry, however, the Army\u2019s ambitious concept seems to have buy-in from its sister services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cthe biggest defense conference of the year\u201d \u2014 prom for national security professionals.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Work was at the AUSA conference not just to promote the idea but to put our money where his mouth is.<\/p>\n

Although he didn\u2019t offer a specific figure, implicit in his presentation was the probability that the gap between the Army\u2019s modernization budget and those for the Navy and the Air Force \u2014 about $40 billion \u2014 will be closed.<\/p>\n

According to Army Gen. David Perkins, commanding general of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, developing \u201cadditive, correlational forces\u201d will be the central factor determining the durability of U.S. military hegemony.<\/p>\n

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein explicitly framed the 21st-century landscape in digital terms:<\/p>\n

How do we use some of the technologies, the autonomy, the machine-to-machine language, learning software\u2026 How do we use some of that to take the volume of ones and zeroes and pull that together so that commanders who are trying to make a decision can actually decide and move forces\u2026 at a pace that the enemy can never keep up with? We want them guessing.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the next phase of the Pax Americana.<\/p>\n

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Money Quote<\/h2>\n

And do not imagine that what we are fighting for is simply the question of freedom or slavery: There is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War<\/em><\/p>\n

Smart Investing,<\/p>\n

David Dittman
\nEditorial Director, Wall Street Daily<\/i><\/p>\n

The post How Do We Fight the \u201cForever War\u201d?<\/a> appeared first on Wall Street Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By WallStreetDaily.com War isn\u2019t always combat on a battlefield \u2014 not when the battlefield is everywhere, all the time. For better or worse \u2014 and like it or not \u2014 the United States has been the most dominant power the world has ever seen. Say what you will about our spiraling federal debt, including the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96427"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96441,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96427\/revisions\/96441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}