What if We Went to Total War Footing?
An acquaintance of mine said this a while back.
“So we have a huge a war with Iran and North Korea so what? If the US went REALLY on to war footing it would be frankly terrifying, especially if that was focused on mass ground forces rather than hundreds of billions on pork barrel toys. Assuming we mobilized en mass mobilize millions of people our military would short of nukes, be unstoppable.
Lets take Germany as an example, Germany fields a quarter million soldiers, with a total military expenditure of 25 billion $US a year.
The US military budget is currently about 450 billion $US, it would not be unreasonable for the US to afford with that current budget say four and a half, five million soldiers. Drop spending per man down to say the level of Brazil? Call it twelve to fifteen million soldiers.
Now raise military spending as a proportion of GDP up so maybe 25 percent? A real ‘war footing’?
Call it fifty million men under arms, in the army alone, not that there are that many people available. I am sure it would be possible to mass recruit and train people from third world nations though if there was that pressing a need for millions and millions of infantry, say a war with China
My reply:
The US does not have the leadership to stop pork barrel spending. We are also very loathe to underequip our men — look at the flax over flax jackets a while back, pun intended.
For the US to throw away lives buy the thousands in a multi nation war or to recruit millions of foreigners, politicos would have to be utterly immune to losing their office —
This means there would have to have been either
#1 a real threat to the US (China launching a land invasion)
#2 a half dozen 9-11 type attacks that people believed weren’t inside jobs or
#3 the elections would have to be suspended with enough troops at home to stop a succession war.
Technically we could recruit 50 million. Looking at the 2000 census getting to 50 million is using roughly everyone from 18-34 who is able including many felons, +cleaning out the prisons (another few million there) and every able veteran under 50 . If we didn’t want women in the war we would need another 25 million foreign auxiliaries.
When we did this the US economy would simply collapse Minus new immigrants the average age in the US is (as of 2000) 34 . In Iran alone its 17 and unlike us they don’t mind dying.
.There would be little travel, greatly reduced consumption, huge shortages and around (guessing here) 50% unemployment. — Gs rationing would KILL the US economy and god help us if the food supply gets shorted.
With that many young people and most of the public service (police and fire personnel) not in the US the US would be a tinderbox. Most of of our police would be gone and people would be very very angry.
Also most progress would just die and a lot of infrastructure would go unfixed . Computer down? Sucks to be you .–All our techs are in the Gulf .
So what we would have is an angry armed population at home a dead economy and severe shortages
Believe me if we went to war in the Gulf or anywhere else on a wide scale oil will be very scarce. Our currency wouldn’t buy anything and many nations might simply not trade with us.
The only bright side is that for a while street crime would plummet. Most of the crime prone demographic would be away.
Once the soldiers came back (and I presume you want them back yes?) you would have millions of Urban combat trained persons, millions of wounded and millions of emotionally and spiritually damaged persons you can’t decompress. War drives men (and women) mad there would be nothing here for them.
If the occupations last a while you might get a lot of Islamic converts as well — you built your own Sharia movement among the disillusioned. Not cool.
If casualties were high among this demographic the US as we know it would NEVER recover reproduction rates aren’t going to suddenly jump (unlike the 1950’s we would have a bad economy and birth control) as a lot of the reproduction demographic would be damaged too.
The US would have to mass import people from China and Latin America and maybe Africa. I am not sure they would come frankly. A bad war like that and the US is done.
That why despite Neo Con fantasies we can fight a big war.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
[...] You know, we could secure Iraq if we really wanted to. We would just need a soldier for every man, woman, and child. But of course, long occupations with a force of millions poses some real problems. [...]