The United States military should be reduced in half.

The primary purpose of the military is to defend its country from actual or perceived threats. The question is whether or not the U.S. military would be able to fulfill this mission if reduced in size by half. The U.S. spends 58 % of the total defense dollars paid out by the world's top 10 military powers. With its unparalleled global reach, the US outspends China, the next-biggest military power, by nearly 6-to-1. It outspends the next biggest competitor, Japan, by 12-to-1 and so on [1]. I doubt that my opponent will be arguing against the reality that the cost to maintain the U.S. military is exorbitant, and easily dwarfs the amount any other country spends in this regard. On defense, we spend more than the next 26 nations combined - 25 of whom are allies! There are significant repercussions to this economic burden. Placing an enormous debt that tax payers simply and quite literally can not afford hurts our economic standing in the world. The U.S. is losing financial credibility which is the real source of power and influence in a global economy. Moreover, it's taking money away from funding other/better causes such as education, combating poverty, infrastructure, research, etc. The money required to eradicate hunger for everyone in the world has been estimated at 30 billion dollars per year - what the world spends on the military every 8 days. Security is of paramount importance for prosperity, but to what extent is a military attack on the U.S. realistic? Considering no other nation comes close to the resources they allocate toward their military, it would be naive to assume that any major super power would find it productive to wage an attack on one of the most influential nations in the world. Indeed, the U.S. still has more sophisticated weapons and military technology than any other nation [2, 3]. There is no nation on the planet that poses a real threat to the U.S. in the way that the USSR did during the Cold War. Our ever-expanding institution is creating an arms race throughout the globe. This is counterproductive to inhibiting war. Indeed, crafting predetermined alliances "just in case" was one of the primary causes of WWI. The UN's entire budget is less than 2% of the world's military expenditure. It is revealing that the world can spend so much on their military, but contribute so little to the efforts of global security, international cooperation, and peace. Excessive military spending is used to maintain unwarranted control of the U.S. population, assert a level of political dominance, and foster the dangerous and very real Military Industrial Complex that is crippling our economy and putting citizens in danger. As long as there is profit in war and politicians have connections to war profiteers, the world will never know peace. A militaristic arms race is detrimental and only helps those who benefit from investment in war materials, such as defense contractors. Politicians support these industries because they have both direct and indirect ties to individuals and corporations who benefit from an expanding military. Many countries rely on militaristic prowess to maintain systematic control over a population in the name of security, such as North Korea. Further, what originally starts as technology for military security tends to evolve into something else. For instance, the U.S. has now made it legal to utilize spy drones against its own citizens for surveillance [4]. Our civil liberties are being taken away while the government grows and military becomes more powerful: obvious trends of fascist inclinations. New policies like the NDAA, which allows "indefinite detention of American citizens without due process at the discretion of the President" is also scary and a direct violation of our Constitutional rights. The military should protect against internal threats, but not help violate the rights of its own citizens. The NDAA bill also awards the military 650 billion dollars for additional military supplies. While every other facet of government is scaling back, the military is not. The Marine Corps Times said, "the Armed Services Committee's proposals on major weapon programs were left unscathed" [5]. The Global Peace Index attempted to quantify the value of peace, and rank countries based on quantitative data and qualitative scores from a range of sources. The top ranking nations on the global peace index were New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Sweden, Japan, Canada, Finland, and Slovenia [6]. Most of these countries spend very little on their military. While strategic alliances are important, one repercussion of U.S. expenditure is that other countries can afford to spend a lot less on their own. Many countries have outsourced their defense to us, which is problematic and unfair for obvious reasons. In terms of self-defense, the U.S. is concerned mostly with terrorism. Terrorism is typically fought as an act of guerrilla warfare. An individual strapping a bomb to themselves and blowing up a bus is not realistically made impotent by adding a million soldiers to our army, or developing better weapon technology. In fact, fighting fire with fire has been proven counterproductive, as our highest defense officials have acknowledged that our military presence in the U.S. has facilitated the recruitment of terrorists, and made us less safe [7]. Terrorism should be dealt with by addressing the underlying causes, and exploring potential solutions outside of outright violence and aggression. Military invasions cannot stop small-scale terrorism attempts, and developing a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy is necessary. Suggestions include increased intelligence sharing, renditions, and specialized raids on terrorist bases, safe havens and training camps [8]. This would be more prudent than having a bunch of kids running a muck amidst great danger in the Middle East, getting nothing out of it but an ugly uniform and bad case of PTSD. In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a task force to study what causes terrorism. It concluded "Muslims do not hate our freedom but rather they hate our policies. Specifically, American direct intervention in the Muslim world through our one sided support in favor of Israel, support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and most of all, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan" [9]. Of course this occupation would significantly decrease if the size and scope of our military were reduced. The fact that we have no business having such a strong presence there is evidenced by the fact that our leaders had to exaggerate and blatantly lie in order to warrant our presence there in the first place. That was over a decade ago, and I invite my opponent to point out all of the ways our occupation has been successful, necessary or beneficial to the U.S. on a cost/benefit analysis. We have troops in more than 150 countries around the world. Rather than focus on man power, we should be focusing on cyber-terrorism. In 2009, Chinese spies hacked the Pentagon's $300 billion F-35 fighter jet project. In an age where cyber security is our biggest threat, increasing our brain power that government's can invest in is more important than having such a massive military. The single greatest threat to our national security is an EMP: having our electrical grid destroyed by an enemy with a low-cost, short range, ship-launched missile armed with a nuclear warhead. The consequences would be far-reaching, with long-lasting, continent-wide crippling effects to our electricity-dependant infrastructure. This is the only (most) realistic form of attack against the U.S., and investing in military expansion won't help. On the other hand, I've argued why the current size and scope of this institution is dangerous and counterproductive. SOURCES: http://debate.org...