Stardate 20020820.2034

(On Screen): In reaction to my declaration below that I considered the UK military the only other "first class" one in the world besides ours, several people have written in to ask me why I don't include Israel's military in that list.

Obviously there's no consensus definition of "first class". To me it's not just a question of quality and fighting capability. There's also things like having a reasonable balance of forces, or the ability to perform many kinds of missions. Naturally enough, the primary job of any nation's military is to defend it, but a first class military can also be used to attack. You need to be able to move your forces where they need to fight, and they need to be able to fight in snow and desert sand and heavy forests and cities, because the political purposes of the nation involved may require any of those. You may need to land across a beach, or use paratroops to capture an airfield or port; you may need to fight on an island in the ocean or in a nation which is a thousand miles from the nearest salt water. You may need to be able to make a small lightning strike against a specific target, or to land a huge force to pound an enemy into the ground.

A first class military will have a variety of abilities, giving the leaders of its nation more flexibility and more options for advancing the political goals of its nation, and its generals more tools to use to accomplish the missions they're assigned. A balanced military will have a substantial navy, to secure control of the sea near a landing zone and to protect an amphibious landing force. It will have paratroops or air-mobile troops (preferably both). It will have a substantial number of Marines. It will have troops trained to fight in mountains and rough terrain, and mechanized troops for fighting in open terrain. It will have well trained infantry with the weapons and tactics to fight in cities. And it's going to have a wide variety of aircraft, to control the air and scout and bomb the enemy and carry supplies and command the battlefield.

We can do those things, and so can the UK to a lesser extent. No one else in the world can do them at anything beyond a very low level, and no one else in the world can fight in as many ways, under as many kinds of conditions, as the US and UK can.

Relative to the US, right now the UK only has two major deficiencies. It has no heavy long range bombers; they have no equivalent of the B-52 or B1, capable of delivering 40 tons of munitions to a target 3000 miles from its airfield. We've recently seen just how useful that can be.

And the UK's carrier aircraft are not really adequate to the job. The primary job of the British carriers is to provide air cover for their fleet to protect it against enemy air attacks, and the only reason that British Harriers are capable of doing that job is because they have superb pilots, and the air forces that they're liable to be facing will be second rate (e.g. Argentina in the Falkland's war). The Harriers themselves are really not what you want for that mission, but with the carriers that the UK currently owns, they can't operate anything else. That deficiency will be corrected once their two new carriers are commissioned, because they'll operate the Joint Strike Fighter.

Understand: the Harrier is a fine jet. All aircraft designs are tradeoffs, and have to be optimized for a mission. The best mission for the Harrier is close support for ground combat, which is what the US Marines use it for. But its capabilities don't match what you really need for air superiority, which is its primary mission for the Royal Navy. Its biggest lack is the ability to fly supersonic, and it doesn't really have the range you'd like. The Royal Navy uses it because nothing else can fly from flat-tops as small as the ones they're using now; they don't really have any choice until newer and larger carriers come into service.

But those are not very big deficiencies, especially given that the UK is so closely allied with the US and could reasonably rely on us for them both. And the diversity of military capabilities that the UK does have is well beyond that of anyone else except us. When evaluated on that basis, every other major military in the world comes up very short.

There is no question that in many ways the Israeli military is very good. And in this case its ability to successfully defend the nation is not just academic. So Israel has an extremely large military capability relative to its size and economic power, and that presents a problem. Part of the solution to that problem is American subsidies, and we give Israel several billion dollars per year much of which is used to support their military.

Though the societal benefit of not having your nation wiped off the map by hostile neighbors is obvious, it remains the case that on a strict economic basis, military spending beyond a certain level damages a nation's economy. It's true that money spent on military acquisition and soldier's pay returns to the economy, but that money has to come from taxation and if the tax burden needed to support the military is too high, it can choke the life out of an entrepreneurial technological capitalist nation, such as Israel. So Israel has been trying to have it both ways: to have an army large enough to make sure it doesn't get destroyed, while not spending so much on it as to destroy its economy with the required taxation. They've also been making tradeoffs.

They haven't totally succeeded, though, and right now the Israeli economy is in pretty deep trou