There is currently a war in Ukraine which might spread to Eastern Europe. That makes this a time of introspection. I am both a combat veteran and a serious student of history, which gives me a perspective badly lacking in our current political leaders and policy makers.
My goal is to keep the USA free, economically powerful and preferably also at peace if possible. That contrasts with the objectives of military leaders and political policy makers whose real goals are often less pure. Military leaders want career growth over time. They also want to insure they are seen as relevant in choosing the best solution to any problem. If your only tool is a hammer, all problems begin to look like nails to you.
Political policy makers are not always operating free from biases either. They pay lip service to my goals of a strong, free, peaceful America but advocate policies skewed in other directions. They must do what ever is popular with the fickle winds of public opinion. Getting reelected is the only thing even more important to them than keeping America free. They also bow to the interests of businesses that profit off war because big powerful corporations are able to provide them with the money with which to be reelected as well as jobs upon retirement.
I have none of those conflicts of interest and more than the average knowledge of the subject matter. Here are a few of my concerns and suggested corrections to each.
1. The National Guards of each of the fifty states have been effectively absorbed into the regular armed forces
force structure. Our South Carolina National Guard has M-1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft missile batteries and associated equipment.
This has been done because the Democrats in congress will not consistently pay for the size and equipment necessary for our regular armed forces to carry out the combat missions they are called upon to perform. Gutless Republicans are equally to blame because they were unwilling to call out and confront the Democrats as those decisions were made.
State governors need to have National Guard troops under their own command and geographically in their states for missions the governor may need to confront. When there is rioting or civil unrest, National Guard troops can serve as force multipliers for law enforcement by providing needed muscle and manpower.
Tanks, missiles and fighter aircraft, are useless in a race-riot. What the governor needs is troops trained and equipped as Military Police. These would be particularly useful in stopping the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property damage. Suppose all the bad actors were jailed within hours of unrest starting and billions of dollars worth of property destruction and looting simply never happened. Historically that property damage has disproportionately included large numbers of minority owned businesses.
The other use of National Guard troops is mitigating the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. In the example of a hurricane, the National Guard can assist evacuating populations at risk before the event. Afterwards they can prevent looting and assist in the delivery of needed aid and humanitarian services.
The 30 flags of the NATO alliance. NATO is the world’s biggest military alliance with agreements for mutual defense. Photo courtesy NATO.
2. The United States should withdraw from all multi-national organizations, agreements or alliances. Replace these if necessary with bilateral agreements. Mutual defense agreements are particularly dangerous because they pose a greater risk of turning little wars into bigger wars by means of sucking major powers into what started as a regional conflict.
For example, NATO has grown from the 12 founding members to the current total of 30 countries. These include, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017) and North Macedonia (2020), along with the date each joined NATO.
Article V of the NATO treaty obligates the United States to consider any military attack on one of those as an attack on us, triggering our full defense of that nation. Can anyone other than me see how stupid it is to have the good old USA obligated to fight the Russian bear based upon any attack against one of these eleven countries? Almost no American can even find all eleven of those countries on a map.
The USA needs only bilateral agreements with each separate country in the world. We should be very hesitant to enter into actual mutual defense pacts where we are treaty obligated to go to war, limiting those only to the British Commonwealth and the Israelis.
Next we keep our nation militarily so strong no nation on earth dares to attack us or our interests. Let the rest of the world walk on eggshells and worry about what might anger us for a change. Si vis pacem, para bellum. We should be spending a minimum of $1 trillion a year on our national defense.
3. We need to drastically overhaul our State Department and CIA, but I will leave my suggested reforms to the subject of a future essay.
Dean Allen is a decorated Vietnam veteran, book author and former Secretary of the Anderson (SC) GOP. He is also President of Freedom Source University.
Please share freely and donate to The Standard on this page to assure the continued availability of news that is ignored too often by the dominant media.
Please “like”, comment, share with a friend, and donate to support The Standard on this page. Become a Patron!
RSS - Posts