Centerfield

Declining Troop Levels

Robert Farley has an post on declining troop levels, motivated by a Max Boot post about how nobody else cares about defense anymore.

One thing little mentioned in either post is that one reason for the decrease is because troops in fact become exponentially more effective as time goes on, because of improving technology. Boot acknowledges increased effectiveness, then ignores it.

Now, there is some free riding going on here. Though European defence in fact remains strong and adequate for self-defense, they've been happy to lean on us to do the foreign interventions. Note, it's a bit of a compliment - no matter what everybody says, they'd fund independent forces suitable for intervention if they didn't trust us.

Note: I posted this earlier in a form I was unhappy with and deleted it. But I had to rebuild the blog to make the deletion take effect. So if you saw the earlier version during the rebuild, that's what happened.