This bloated war machine is beside the point

Trump believes that building a gigantic military and ignoring foreign dictators is the best way to “protect”  America but even if you set aside the immorality and waste, it just won’t work. Trump thinks this is about aircraft carriers but it is not.

The Daily Beast asked, “Is this what war looks like in 2029?

The United States lavishes on its armed forces more than twice as much as No. 2 spender China does, and more than 10 times what No. 6 Russia does.
[…]
But the countries the U.S. government identifies as its top threats, China and Russia, have made it very clear they have no intention of waging war that way. Instead, they conduct shadowy campaigns where money and information are the weapons and the internet is the battleground.
[…]
Russia is perfecting the art of weakening an enemy politically before surreptitiously inserting incognito special forces, and finally deploying overt military force only when the opposition is already collapsing. That’s how Russia carved out territory in the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine beginning in 2014 and how it turned Syria into a client state starting in 2015….Meanwhile, China is buying, bullying and arguing its way into greater influence. Beijing sent militiamen on fishing boats to claim disputed islands in the China Seas then dredged delicate coral reefs to build bases on these islands, all while arguing in international forums that the land-grabs were perfectly legal.

There’s much more at the link.  He concludes,  “The U.S. government has no clear plan for countering these new approaches to conquest.”

I have no idea if this analysis is correct but I do suspect that the combination of Trumpism, massive military buildup and a willful blindness to the emerging new threats is dangerous.

I have long thought of Barbara Tuchman’s observation in “The March of Folly” that when countries build up massive militaries they inevitably want to use them. In our case it will likely be a temptation to use violence but also a invitation for others to use these more modern forms of warfare against us.

It’s an unstable situation and very worrisome unless our political system gets it together quickly.