U.S. military might

Max Boot’s “Why the U.S. acts alone” (BDN, March 5) seems a sound analysis of the relative military potentials of various nations.

However, the article is oblivious to the political aspect of the problem he decries.

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoyalCanadianNavy#note-2, “By the outbreak of war in September 1939, the RCN still had only six destroyers and a handful of smaller ships.” As Boot states, “At the end of World War II, Canada had … more than 400 ships.”

By omitting the RCN’s prewar numbers, Boot implies that Canada had always been a major naval power.

A more reasonable explanation might be that Canadians proved themselves equal to an emergency, just as Americans did two years later.

The larger point ignored by this list of numbers is the fact of history that large standing militaries present the constant temptation to employ them for something, whether useful or not.

The fall in defense budgets, excepting our own, cited by Boot can be interpreted as the practical response to lessening threats from other nations, especially when the other nations reciprocate.

Boot refers to Britain’s “age-old rival, France”: Is he trying to warn one or the other of some impending threat?

President Eisenhower explicitly warned us of the threat posed by our own “military-industrial complex.”

Events of the past four years have proved him prescient. Our military-industrial complex is thrashing around the world to no conceivable purpose other than its own aggrandizement. Billions of American dollars in cash were sent to Baghdad “to improve morale?”

Wouldn’t New Orleans have appreciated some of that?

The old saw, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail,” seems to apply here.

Chris Lamb

Bangor