We wouldnt necessarily have to cut a significant amount of service members....ending the wars and shutting down the bases is significant cost. We can keep most of them on payroll always training and doing things like going to school. Id have to look into how 750 billion is excactly spent before I came to conclusion.
We can use service members to protect borders instead of building that stupid wall. If they are going to use tax payer money to pay for service members, this countries infrastructure needs a significant overhaul coast to coast. Actually as Im tying this, I can imagine a world 20 years from now where we wouldnt need most of them anyways, most tasks can be accomplished in some kids living room on their Playstation 8s. Everything is being autonomized. Service members should always be prepared for the next world to come so they can be self dependent.
Its a big discussion on this topic but I can see how a 75% military spending can be done and why people would debate why it cant. What if it was 60% cut?...I can guess we would be close simply shutting down all the wars and shutting down these Punic War era bases, but we all know they dont want that and the big problem is corporate military complex and bribed politicians. Its all about big business. All of this is about profit, not morality so its difficult for me to want to support propping up the ship primarily to keep peoples jobs, but Im in to finding solutions for transitioning.
The only way to make significant funding cuts is to cut manpower significantly and to completely change the mission requirements that the USG expects of it.
FWIW, I actually study National Security and History. As in, those are the academic fields that I study. It is much more complicated than I am able to get into on here, and parts of it are well beyond my knowledge level as well.
There are certain mission requirements that absolutely
cannot be removed. Nuclear Weapon maintenance being one. Just NW maintenance alone has a massive yearly monetary commitment to ensure that the weapons are functional and secure.
On top of tasks like that, our current doctrine (reaching back much further than just Trump) requires that the military be capable of
successfully winning 2 wars simultaneously. This is the mission standard that is expected of our Chiefs of Staff, and this is what their funding requests are based on.
As a final point, your contention that our troops are not necessary overseas,
especially in Asia (Japan and SK) is based on a false premise. Our soldiers are not in Japan for fear that Japan may strike us. That may have been the point in 1945, but today it serves a different purpose. Our military presence in that region has the purpose of stopping nuclear proliferation in SE Asia (among other things). In fact, the
only reason that SK and Japan have not pursued them was that the USG explicitly said that if they were to develop them then we would pull our troops out and leave them to fend for themselves with the DPRK and China. Those 2 nations did not like that outcome so they abandoned their programs.
Now, as a guy who studies Nuclear Weapons Security Theory, there is some argument about whether or not nuclear proliferation is a
bad thing, but our particular outlook nationally has been to consider it a bad thing and take action to stop it. Our overseas garrisons seem to be effective at accomplishing that goal.
