Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy here. Hat tip Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast blog.
This is important for several reasons:
1) My guess is that in any prioritization, support for basic research (what’s termed 6-1 in DOD parlance) will be cut the earliest and the most…
2) With the US still involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to imagine that the USN carrier groups would be cut back, which has enormous implications for the protection of global trade (there is no comparable blue water navy).
3) I can’t see how the US would be willing to project boots on the ground, under pretty much any scenario short of complete mobilization. That will be part of the geopolitical calculus of every other nation and non-state actor around the globe.
Discoverers and Discoveries 