Beginning of the End

Defense Department Budget Cuts

The main headline on CNN today is spouting the DOD's new prerogative to cut military spending dramatically. Let us take a look at the world in terms of military power and maybe we can see why a strong defense force is necessary. Also how cutting military can harm jobs and really hurt an already struggling industry even more. 


First take a look at this page on Wikipedia here. 

The United States used to be a world leader in military power. However, after a stalemate in Korea and the highly unpopular war in Vietnam public opinion changed and the military saw the post WWII golden age at an end. So after 30 years the military has dwindled to a place of 9th in total military power, 52nd in military per capita, and 11th in reserve military. We do maintain a strong second in terms of active military, loosing to only China. 

What is interesting to me (it might be the United States' size that allows this) is a small percentage of the population can serve in the military while the military can still maintain the second largest active duty in the world. Here are the percentages of population to total active duty from 1940-2010 (Defense per capita). 


United States
1940- .34%
1945- 9%
1950- .9%
1955- 1.9%
1960-1.4%
1965- 1.45%
1970-1.48%
1975-1.04%
1980-.90%
1985- .94%
1990- .82%
1995- .61%
2000- .49%
2003- .50%
2010- .47%
2014(proposed)- .43%

The bottom line is that we will still have a large active military, through technology the modern DOD is becoming more efficient on a daily basis. We are seeing the removal of humans from the front lines and replacing them with more expendable technologies such as drones and robots. So my question is why is it such a big deal that the army wants to move humans out of harms way? 

If war were to break out tomorrow even with the defense cuts, I strongly doubt that the United States would be unprepared for such a conflict. What this should be seen as is the DOD finally realizing that they have a spending problem, and them trying to responsibly resolve the issue without putting the Nation's defense in jeopardy.