As I mentioned above, I was being generous. 0 is quite possible.
And I hasten to restate, Europe is fucked.

Of 3 bombers Russia would have had in 1960, M-4, Tu-16 & Tu-95, the latter 2 only technically had the range to crash in the vicinity of CONUS. They could not carry a bomb load out that far.

The Tu-95 barely…

I’m probably being generous. Serious casualties weren’t likely until there were missiles actually in Cuba.

Handfuls of Soviet bombers on fumes might just barely reach a target somewhere in what’s now the rust belt, or Washington but that’s it.  

The US Army hasn’t shot down a $200 drone with a Patriot missile, not according to your own article, nor any other covering the story.

Let history record if that happened in the 90's, it would be better than whenever the North DOES eventually collapse in the future.

Unlike the 90's there is now a strong China eager to annex huge portions of North Korea in order to establish a large buffer zone between it, and an American ally, in addition to control…

The entire Cold War, all the bombers, missile silos, subs, massive radar networks, spy satellites, Civil Defense, all of it was an astronomically expensive show we put on the convince the Russians that if they attacked us it would mean the destruction of their own country.

The heavy lifting of the US Navy are fighters & the carriers which operate them.

MAD worked because the actors were rational.
But nothing about ballistic-missile dynamics forced people to slow down; quite the opposite it is the 16-22 minute flight time which creates the “one flies, they all fly” rule.

BOMBERS force people to slow down; BALLISTIC-MISSILE DEFENSE literally affords one the ability to…

... the defenses are SPY-1 Aegis on escorting ships.

Jobs are a very real consideration but keeping the industrial base intact is the fundamental reason, IMO. The jobs are incidental but of particular concern to lawmakers.

A consistent theme I’ve seen across the entire internet whilst debating military hardware, especially intersections of American and foreign equipment, is that foreign equipment works at brochure face value; and a corollary that extreme skepticism is reserved for American equipment.

Besides the awful tendency to burn/throw turrets, and kill crew like clockwork.

The T-90 is not widely considered the best MBT in the world by anyone who knows anything. It is, essentially, an evolution of the T-72 and both 72/90 share gross limits on the length of their sabot penetrators (can’t remember, <700 maximum) due to the dimensions and limits of it’s horizontally-arranged ammo/propellant…

Not with a whole-new tank, no.

*prays for lightning strikes near the motor pool*

Obvious middle ground idea: subordinate FA under a different blog than Jalopnik; say, Gizmodo.

I don’t agree with cutting the Coast Guard, either, and I’ll reserve criticism until it’s final. But don’t bury the lead: this isn’t done yet. Seems like we’ve been here before, have we been here before? We’ve been here before:

Lol, the lack of critical thinking by contemporary Americans crosses the political divide; it is not an uniquely Conservative failing.

You’re not wrong but you’re not right either.

There are too many Marines, living and dead, for this to happen, though it’s a plainly-logical deduction I’ve seen articulated before.

I guarantee you no Gripen would be spared Americanization to the benefit of domestic industry. That would neatly wipe out cost-savings vis-a-vis off-the-shelf F-16's.