Does the U.S. need a navy?
John Quiggin isn't so sure:
According to Wikipedia, the Navyâ??s budget is around $150 billion a year. What does it deliver for that money? The US hasnâ??t engaged in naval warfare on any significant scale since 1945, a period during which the other arms of its military have fought five major wars, and lots of smaller ones. The record in those wars, including an outright defeat in Vietnam, a status quo ante ceasefire in Korea, and highly equivocal outcomes in the two Iraq wars and Afghanistan casts plenty of doubt on the idea of that US military as a whole is a â??high-performing agencyâ?, and raises the question of why so much of the budget has been allocated to an armed force that does hardly any actual fighting.
Sounds a bit too harsh to me.
