The US Military’s Massive Global Transportation System

The US could cut back and still compete in the West Pacific/South China see but it would have to focus there very heavily to the detriment of the existing implied obligations to NATO. Part of the US's politically dominant position post WW2 is that we've signed ourselves up to be anywhere in the world fighting a large scale conflict inside of a month with huge stockpiles of everything you need to fight all over the world, including one floating one that can backup the standard land based prepositioned stocks. [0] Granted a lot of that was also enabled by being the only major economy not significantly bombed through the war but that advantage was heavily invested in since then. [0] Wendover Productions has a great video about the insane amount of logistics dedicated to the goal of never having to wait for materiel practically anywhere in the world. [this video]

I'm really worried that cheap, abundant and reliable is not something our defense industry is capable of. - As a result of deindustrialization, we can't ramp up production of critical components. We make up for that by prepositioning supply depots around the world, and these depots allow a brigade or so to fight for a few weeks. But once that runs out, things get hairy. See this article: [link] which talks about "surge" capability after a four year ramp up time and also here: [link] - We have little sea lift capacity to move gear around to the hot spot even if we were able to produce it in large quantities. [link] see also [link] A nice summary of US military logistics is here: [this video] - US gear has a reputation of being expensive to maintain and breaking down easily, even though it is generally best in class. - We critically rely on air dominance Basically we've optimized our military for global police actions by pre-positioning small amounts of troops and supplies around the world, rather than maintaining an industrial base with a large amount of slack and the ability to quickly ramp up production to support a sustained conflict. At some point an adversary is going to call our bluff with a major sustained conflict - and sufficient AA defenses to deny us air dominance. Then people will realize how hollowed out our defense industry has become, and they'll look at the huge amount we spend on defense and how little we are getting in return for that investment.