Cutting military spending

[cartesiandaemon]

A while back, I asked, "If you accepted the government did have to cut spending a lot, what would you cut." Several people made the obvious suggestion of cutting military. http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/784255.htmlRead more... )

Comments

[mobbsy]

There were suggestions of sharing the aircraft carriers with France, but were rejected - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11176489

I wouldn't put the aircraft carriers in a special category, they're a big ticket item, particularly if you combine them with the F35B aircraft to equip them, but not entirely different to the rest of the military in the way Trident is.

Trident is a political tool, not a weapon (pace Clausewitz).

[cartesiandaemon]

There were suggestions of sharing the aircraft carriers with France, but were rejected

Oh, that's really interesting, thank you. I'm glad to see my guesses weren't completely off base.

I wouldn't put the aircraft carriers in a special category, they're a big ticket item, particularly if you combine them with the F35B aircraft to equip them, but not entirely different to the rest of the military in the way Trident is.

Hm. I think they're somewhat qualitatively different, but I agree not as qualitatively different as Trident. But I mainly broke them out because they're very expensive, something a lot of people would like to cut, but there's specific reasons why we can't. Specifically, they're something we invest in that many countries don't.

Trident is a political tool, not a weapon (pace Clausewitz).:) Yeah. Although you could put it the other way round, and say that a weapon that prevents wars but is never used is the best sort of weapon. (Eek, that sounds like I'm endorsing MAD. I certainly don't want to endorse the sort of

[atreic]

Isn't an army a political tool?

[mobbsy]

Hence my 'pace Clausewitz', referencing the well known quote from On War; "We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means."

However, Trident is solely political. It has no use other than as a threat. We're not going to nuke people just a little bit to make them do (or stop doing) something.

[ilanin]

The basic problem with sharing an aircraft carrier is the following

[cartesiandaemon]

Good point. I was thinking of cases where we might hopefully agree or at least be neutral, but times when one party's private business would send a bad message for the other would be quite common too. I can think of possible work-arounds, but none that would be very attractive.

[ilanin]

the UK and Australia have foreign policies so similar to the US that what they'd do with the ships would almost certainly not be objectionable in Washington

The notable exception to this being the Falklands; would Washington allow a part-owned carrier to be deployed to the South Atlantic while their foreign policy is still to refuse to recognise British sovereignty over the islands?

S.

[ilanin]

I should probably add that during the Cold war there was consideration of sharing the NATO nuclear deterrent between member states (as in, more broadly than "between the US and Britain" [France's nuclear weapons not being a part of the NATO command structure]), but in the end the politics didn't work out and nobody was able to agree on how to actually do it.

[cartesiandaemon]

Ah, thank you! It's interesting we did try it, even if it didn't work out.

[ewx]

Nuclear sharing

[pavanne]

Wouldn't it be more practical for a (large) private company to own the aircraft carrier and just rent it out to the highest bidder at any one time?

[cartesiandaemon]

I was thinking that. It's what happened to the nuclear deterrent in Stone Canal: after the breakup of the Soviet Union, ex-soviet nuclear subs and sites fell into private hands, who sold off, not the hardware, but the right to use it. Deterrent insurance policies were sold to almost everyone -- first strikes were prohibitively expensive because one nuke could be rented as a deterrent for lots of countries at once, but would be used up in a first strike.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure how that would square with using nuclear weapons as a deterrent against conventional attack.

So, that was one of the workarounds I was interested in, but I'm not sure it would actually work.

[naath]

Outsourcing nuclear deterrent is a cool idea but... I think just not having any would be better.

I think we should have an EU armed forces. It would be cheaper than all having our own. We'd all be able to use it to defend out own territory from attack. Obvs we would spend a lot of time disagreeing about which oil-rich nation to invade next and almost never get around to actually attacking anyone; this is good, because the answer is NONE OF THEM.

[ilanin]

I would need to see an extremely well-researched and documented study before I would accept the conclusion that the EU would be able to provide an acceptable level of defence for a cheaper amount than the continent currently spends. Every single large multinational defence contract I can think of has been a mess that went massively overbudget.

(I can also think of large single-nation defence contracts that went massively overbudget, but giving defence contractors an additional excuse for being slow and expensive by, say, assigning all of the new jet fighter's electronics to a German company for political reasons, despite the fact they've never made a military aircraft before, is just a bad plan).

[mobbsy]

Now I'm home and can more conveniently paste links, the annual MoD Major Projects Report makes interesting reading.