Militay Repatriation Corps

Dmitri Orlov has a great essay up today on how utterly hopless and wasteful is the U.S. military.

The empire is ending, and we can whistle past the graveyard, pretending it won't happen to us, not putting on the brakes to minimize the impact. Or we can make the best of it.

We need to bring the armed forces home, and dismantle and recycle most of their weapons and machines. We could not fight a world war with them anyway-- we cannot even prevail with them where we employ overwhelming might against single militarily inferior countries. We can destroy their infrastructure, kill lots of people, but we cannot achieve cessation of hostilities on favorable terms (which must be the goal or what the hell is?).

Invasion risk? We won't be putting our selves at risk, we'll be gauranteeing a better future. Protecting our borders will require a small fraction of ther resources required for being The Global Superpower. We're pretty safe having borders only with Canada and Mexico.

First Strike risk? If we step down from Global Superpower, no country on earth would have us in their sights as the Great Evil.

Now, to close down all those bases in an orderly way; to decomission, deconstruct and recycle all those aircraft carriers and fighter jets; to disarm our nuclear weapons and find (temporary!) solutions for storing the radioactive materials: is going to take a lot of people a long time.

What to do?

A Militay Repatriation Corps.

*To effect an orderly redeployment home of all our troops worldwide.

*To effect an orderly relinquishing of empire.

*To dismantle the foreign war machine.

We don't want to have an abruptly unemployed bunch of former soldiers. So we initially staff it with the current armed forces. But we also do a lot of hiring-- there's plenty of work to do for a long time, and new and different expertise will be needed at all levels.   ¶ 2:29 PM