U.S. Military

BY: Xzadrean Gladney

The last time the U.S. Army was smaller than 450,000 troops, it was 1940 and the United States had yet to join World War II. Announced yesterday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's proposed budget would shrink the American military to the smallest it has been since right before the deadliest war in history. Yet this is not a return to the pre-war state of unreadiness. While the military Hagel proposes might be smaller than the one that precedes it, it will also remain the most technologically advanced military in history.

Improved technology, for example, let's look at spy planes. The U-2 (pictured above) first flew in 1955, and was America's chief high-altitude spy plane for the entire Cold War. Giant film test patterns, made to calibrate the spy plane's original film cameras, still dot the American landscape, artifacts of time before satellite surveillance. U-2s cruise at 70,000 feet, and can do so for well over 10 hours. The chief constraint on a U-2 isn't the plane itself, but the need for an onboard pilot, who must be awake and seated for the entirety of that exhausting flight.

The Littoral Combat Ship, a new modular naval vessel, that can do some light combat, anti-submarine, or mine-sweeping jobs usually assigned to frigates or destroyers, was designed to have a crew of 40. While recent revisions have that number going as high as 88, that's still less than half the typical 200-person crew of a frigate performing the same role. The new budget keeps the LCS program in place, though at only 32 ships, instead of the 52 expected.

Left unmentioned in Hagel's remarks was the laser truck the Army is currently developing, and the laser weapon the Navy is putting on a ship. The HEL-MD laser truck shot down drones and mortar rounds in the New Mexico desert last December. While lasers are pricey to develop, they are incredibly cheap to fire, costing about $1 per shot. This makes them a very good tool for shooting down small projectiles and incoming attacks. These technologies are still new, but their very existence was the stuff of literal fantasy in 1940.