Ah yes, the power and resources that flow from the rich nation of Afghanistan.
I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.
Outside of the excessive dev costs, and high price tags of these things, ongoing, year after year, institutional knowledge of "how to construct weaponry", and "how to test / build" the same is absolutely vital.
You absolutely cannot be in a position where no company and employees exist, which knows these things.
The cannot be overstated. Imagine a war breaks out, and now you try to build ... missiles. You have no tooling, no factory, no employees which have ever done so, and no supply chains either. Nor even engineered, first step designs!
Now, I agree things are not perfect, but something must be in place. Something ongoing.
This same logic holds with the military too. You want to lose a war? Have a no standing military, or one which is never deployed.
You need trained, experienced troops, which will train other troops if a massive war breaks out and your numbers swell. You need experienced persons to lead, which have not been trained in isolation.
Canada tries to solve this, as much as possible by peacekeeping. It's not perfect though, blue hats don't often engage in large scale actions.
Point in all this is, trying to pick just, humanitarian causes for troop deployment, and weaponry usage in the field, and to keep supply chains alive, is difficult, yet is literally essential if you want to have a real defense potential.
Or should the US, the West, just degrade their military, and hope for the best?
(Canada was in Afghanistan for more than a decade.)
It really sounds like you've managed to reason into "we have a military, so it's best to use it for its own sake." If so, that's pretty frightening logic, particularly for anyone in the rest of the world.
All the fluff aside you just said that the US (or any other country for that matter) needs to mess with other countries in order to keep their military in proper shape. Sure it does make sense from that standpoint. Or maybe not and conducting military exercise is more than enough given your already very advanced state.
The receiving end however might hold a different point of view.
"Standing army" used to be an epithet, a sign that a society had lost its way. The best military we've ever had was the one we built from scratch for WWII. They curbstomped two actual "evil empires". Everything we've had since has been a pale imitation, not fit to wear the same uniform. That's because in WWII we were trying to win, and ever since then we've been trying to spend money.
If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize. (What, are the Nazis going to rise again?) But if we did, we could.
> If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize
This is a very 1990s/2000s point of view. We have a real global competitor now. China's military spending is rising faster than their fast-rising GDP. Some recent war games exercises suggest that the US could already be in losing position in a conventional war with China [1].
Not even our generals are stupid enough to get in a war with China. (Our politicians probably are, but they're not in charge.) They'd probably take all of our Pacific Islands, and they would definitely sink all our carriers. It will take a few years for the Pentagon to forget the asskickings we've received recently. They're searching for nations smaller and weaker than Syria; China is off the list completely. Even though we spend far more on the military than they do.
However, we don't have to get in a war with China. We owe them trillions of dollars. We're probably not going to start out by straight-up defaulting, but there are all sorts of things we could fiddle with to put the hurt on them. What are they going to do in response? Stop exporting us lots of crap? That would be good for American workers. Maybe they'll hack American firms' insecure shit more? Ditto.
We would live happier, healthier, and more prosperous lives if we stopped viewing every challenge through a military lens. Especially since our military is incompetent to achieve any goal through military action.
How does maintaining military readiness and being at war in Afghanistan relate? Isn't it reducing our military readiness and preparatory investment? Couldn't we have bought hundreds of aircraft carriers for the cost?
I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.