Back in the day when adults governed America, we had a president by the name of Eisenhower. Went by “Ike.” You may remember him or have heard of him. Maybe seen the movie… or (gasp) read a book (small, square thing, made out of paper; but that’s not important right now…).
He and MacArthur were the last two American General Officers to win their wars. (No, Gulf-1 doesn’t count. It was basically a Pershing-like chase-Pancho-back-across-the-border mini-engagement that took even less time.)
Anyway, as president, Ike’s foreign & defense policies were summarized as “MR,” or “Massive Retaliation.” The policy was that if America or an ally were attacked, the retaliation would be “massive,” e.g. nuclear. (Nobody attacked us or our allies.)
MacArthur, although he won his war and never ran for president, wanted, during the UN Korea “police action,” to spread nuclear waste along the trails used by the ChiComs to reach S Korea, depriving them of invasion and resupply routes and, ultimately, victory - and perhaps collapsing N Korea (which would have saved thousands of American lives, perhaps a million or more of the two million Koreans killed, and much of the joint cost of our deployment there, about $1T annually for the past 70 years), but Truman (D) wouldn’t go for it and MacArthur’s big mouth got him fired.
Because they’d experienced real war and knew the cost to soldiers, these Generals appreciated productivity in warfare: the higher the ratio of enemy KIA to your own, the more quickly a war is over, the fewer people die on both sides, and the less money the war costs.
Our young men can become fathers instead of dead, and taxpayer money can be left in the pockets of more-prosperous taxpayers or spent on useful things, among which war is not.
“How many schools did that bomber cost?” was a question Ike asked during his presidency-long fight with the Pentagon and what he christened, “The military-industrial complex.”
What are the most productive weapons? Nukes. Do they save lives? Well… in Japan they shortened to 1945, a war our war planners figured would last until 1949, and killed 6-8 million fewer Americans and Japanese than it was estimated would die in a conventional invasion of Japan. (Full disclosure, my dad was on an LST in the Pacific and would have participated in said invasion.)
What’s my point?
Well, we can’t afford the force we have stationed in 88% of the countries around the globe, we can’t staff the force with capable warriors - and our lowering of enlistment standards for the purposes of social engineering will, by definition, make a force organized, trained and equipped to kill, less able to accomplish that mission. Translation: they’re not capable for the wars we insist on fighting.
DIE is what the military is supposed to make the enemy do, not itself…
Since we can’t staff a conventional force, since we can’t afford to replace all the conventional munitions we’ve (unconstitutionally - zero authorization exists for foreign aid) given away in the absurdity of the Nuland/Kagan/OBiden War on Ukraine, since we neither can afford nor need to deploy to the 172 countries to which we are deployed, it’s time to reconsider MR.
Doing so would have immediate positive consequences.
Shrinking the force intentionally because we’d not need a force capable of a large land battle (which is just recognizing the reality that we lack this capability today), while letting adversaries know we’ll just nuke their ass, would avoid the entire nobody-wants-to-play-army anymore problem, particularly with the gays, trannies and dog-face pony soldiers infecting our ranks…
More importantly, switching to MR would drastically cut both the near-trillion-dollar annual budget & size of the force and disallow the Complex from sticking their bullets into every foreign body politic that they want to screw.
When I was a cadet at USAFA (Class of ‘76), one of the many quotes we learned was this one, by General R. E. Lee:
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
With our current video-sharing technology we have made war into YouTube entertainment - except for the men and women we increasingly send off, to bastardize Tennyson, ‘to fight to kill to die, but not to win.’
We have done exactly the opposite of Lee’s dictum: we have grown too fond of war.
If we’re serious about changing the behavior of an opponent to the point of killing and dying, which is the entire purpose of war, we should focus on killing them, not us, and do so productively and only when truly necessary.
Which brings us to the ultimate reason to return to a policy of nuclear response:
Making war again so terrible will, if we are smart enough to do so, cause us to quit doing it.
The entire planet would be thankful.
Get rid of the war mongers which from my ignorant perspective seems to be the military materials contractors and their lobbyists. They exist on death and destruction only. It is their purpose. Without them our senators and congress persons... would not be getting their pockets lined for votes. As we are all aware by now, votes are purchased at all levels.
Opinion:
War deterrence can be cost effective, swift, efficient and clearly understood by adversary leadership to be “... so terrible ...” (to them personally) without the threat of nukes.
Keep the nukes sidelined for MAD where they belong.