OT or Not OT: Twilight 2030

[Raellus]

I've been working on projections for U.S. military equipment and force strength and the findings are a little bit on the alarming side. I'm probably beating a dead horse here, but I really think that any projection to a third world war needs to take the following into consideration. Although the U.S.A.'s gargantuan military budget is still much larger than other emerging [rival] powers, much of it goes either to paying for the costly, long-running counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan or for expensive, small batch weapon systems like the F-22 (for which orders have been significantly reduced). The litany of projects that have been cut or downgraded in recent years is rather long. The following is from an article on the downgrading of the U.S. Army's GCV program (to replace the M2 Bradley IFV):

“The Army can’t afford anything new,” said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, Arlington, Va. “It can afford mods, it can afford upgrades, but clean sheet designs have fallen out of the modernization plan. There’s no GCV, no Armed Aerial Scout — it’s all a continuation of the Army’s ‘Big 5’ during the Reagan years.”

In the 1980s, the Army invested heavily in Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Patriot missile defense system. All of those systems are expected to remain in the Army inventory for years, or decades, to come.

http://www.defensenews.com/article/2...T02/301180024/

The USAF and USN are also finding that items on their wish lists aren't safe from the chopping block.

The active U.S. Army is set to shrink to around 400,000 by the end of this decade. Although the remaining force will still be quite capable, I don't think the U.S. military is going to be the world beater that it was (arguably) 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

IF the defense budget trends that I've been harping on in this thread continue, there's no doubt in my mind that the U.S. will be hard pressed if it finds itself in a major, conventional land war with another world power, let alone more than one. This will be a prominent feature of T2030.