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January 23, 2006
Priorities and politics
The questions of politics, as in economics, concern us with dealing with limitless wants and limited resources. Classically, we want infinite amounts of both Guns and butter. And also classically, our main political parties spend their time arguing over which is more important. The only way to get both (another aircraft carrier and more Pell grants) is to expand the economy...
On a slightly different note, it’s fair to say that most Americans would like, in the abstract, to topple each and every evil regime in the world. That’s what we, as Americans, want. We don’t seem to be willing to give up much butter to get it, though...
Right now, we’re engaged in a debate over the ugly, terrifying Iranian regime. Ought we go into Iran and grant freedom to the Iranians by smashing their theocratic rulers? Adding urgency to this discussion is the terrifying fact that Iran both wants and is capable of building nuclear weapons...
Were this a video game, we could simply go into “editor” mode, give ourselves another million troops, and tromp on in. In real life, however, we are limited to the resources we have on hand. The biggest limitation, in fact, is that we simply don’t have enough soldiers to take and hold Iran...
It isn’t that we can’t take the country. Iran would fall as quickly as Iraq did. What would be difficult is the occupation. See, there are “force multipliers” that can be employed in warfare. Helicopters, tanks, bullet-proof vests, night vision goggles; all these things make a soldier more effective than he would be without them. But occupation is a different beast. It requires soldiers on the ground, mixing with the people, figuring out their problems, and solving them. There are some force multipliers available to police, but not enough. And nothing we have for occupation duty is as effective as the arsenal we have for the invasion...
To solve that problem, we need sheer numbers. Numbers we don’t have. Our army is stretched to the breaking point. Indeed, we have so few soldiers that we are willing to take the worst scorers, the ones most unfit. This is having negative consequences...
Right now, we have major commitments on the Korean peninsula, in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps it is ironic that our current commitments so closely resemble the fault-lines of the cold war, and yet each commitment represents one we have freely chosen. To abandon any of them would lead to bloodbath. Until we can solve the manpower problem, we simply cannot afford to invade Iran...
Posted by Andrew at January 23, 2006 12:00 AM
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