The US should increase military spending.

R1. Note: This RfD has been written whilst reading the debate.

Pros position is arguing the benefits of having a military. While I accept the inherent premise that more money means more of these positives intuitively, this is inherently a weak argument without fundamentally establishing the necessity of more money, to enact all beneficial plans - or even what necessary plans cannot be funded now.

Cons defense of the SQ is effectively explaining how bad one aspect of the SQ is with waste and with the issues caused by the military with radicalization. While this is okay, this position is necessarily weaker than either defending the SQ or presenting the counter plan.

R2. Pro provides a plan for usage of wasted capacity, though I felt that pro did not give sufficient warrant for this position.

Pro only refutes issues on base capacity, with most of the other issues of wastage not addressed.

Pro later massively undermined his position by conceding the US is already safe and secure - strongly supporting the SQ which he is arguing against.

Pros primary remaining points, charitably, is that the SQ of military presence should be maintained - as removing them was not part of cons argument - I feel this argument was irrelevant.

I reject cons statement that pro is changing his advocacy - R1 set up his advocacy as a broad argument that the military can better protect and intervene - I do not feel that concrete examples are outside this advocacy.

Moving on, I feel con undermines the SQ here - by arguing that extra funding will evaporate due to administrative costs intuitively implies that the SQ is insufficient, in the absence of a counter plan, to me, in this argument con somewhat conceded that the military needs more funds or it won’t be able to protect the country.

Cons counter to military intervention suggested by pro is valid, and for me spells out that the proposed plan for additional funding pro spelt out is not beneficial.

Con continues his arguments that intervention causes terrorism - this necessarily shows the negative impact of the harms caused by pros plans

R3:

Pro appears to again concede the SQ is sufficient - by accepting the us has more money than needed for the current state of military activity.

Pros advocacy of enhanced spending in this regard is effectively that the US needs to intervene with the countries stated. For this pro has to justify why the extended intervention is more beneficial than SQ. Pro doesn’t seem to offer any calculus for this, and his reasons for benefit (lives and security), are largely vague and non-specific.

Cons objection to pros new points are noted. But I don’t feel pros position advocacy is much more than building on what’s there - volume of points is another matter that I may consider

Cons arguments here are broad - but in my view are relevant - Con is clearly outlining the harms of pros plan.

This debate, was quite odd - as I found that both pro and con argued against their position.

However - I feel that while con somewhat argued against the SQ - it could be reconciled with the resolution where as pros concessions could not. Because of this, I felt the debate boils down to whether pros plans were beneficial in general and outweighed the harms com outlined - I felt pro clearly did not establish this, thus con wins on arguments.

S&G: Tied. Both were legible. Had there been a single spelling mistake, that would not warrant the point being assigned. The point is a penalty for severe problems. ... Related notes (presentation): Pro you should probably put your replies onto the next line from your quotes. Both of you should use bold or otherwise highlight opponent quotes.

Sources: Tied. Admittedly, I will not check tinyURL for what the sources really were. So my stylistic preference leans toward pro on this one (leaning doesn't get the point... both sides seemed to hold their own in this area).

Conduct: Tied. Both behaved in a civil manner. I do not consider mere faulty reasoning to affect this. Personal attacks or worse are required.

Arguments: Con. Talk of robots and the desire to start WWIII (attack allies of countries we don't want to fight...), were very unconvincing. Talk of 22% of our bases being useless, was alone enough reason to cast doubt toward a need to spend even more money (there's no way to assure that any increase would not go toward such bloat). The problems of our budget already radicalizing our enemies were wonderful additions.

Regarding the goalpost: Pro, take a sliver of the topic you want and start a debate on it. Your robot soldiers for example (I should note that in this one, the budget overages for known technologies pre-refuted you). Think of it this way:
P1, War against communism!
P2, Robots!
P3, whatever...
C, budget increase is the only way to attain all this.

The problem is that none of the premises are to be taken seriously without serious support. If none of them hold up, there's no reason within your argument to support the conclusion. However, if you make a debate just on the benefits to going to war with various countries (or even a debate that their allies would be unlikely to join in, I suppose WWI and WWII having not happened as a supporting example), you could then build up the skill needed to support this broader topic.

I feel like this debate went off the rails early and kept shifting further off the rails as it went, the reason largely being Pro’s case.

What does the resolution require of Pro? It requires that he support an increase in the funding for the US military. Granted, this also allows Pro to argue what the US military would do with THAT money. Notice the word in all caps.

What does Pro do with his argument? He states that it’s past time that the US acted to combat certain nations in the world. There’s much hay made over which nations this applies to (and this is why Pro should have stated his case very clearly up front, though I’d say this is only part of the problem). Pro also argues that these should be joint efforts with NATO, and that robot soldiers should be developed.

There’s a problem here: what the resolution requires and this spate of arguments do not line up. Remember the specific phrasing for what the resolution requires of Pro – he’s talking about increasing the amount of funds going to the military (not clear how much in the way of funds, but hey, no one seems to care… for some reason), not reallocating money currently available to the military. To my mind, that is extra-topical, i.e. it goes beyond the bounds of the resolution, and therefore shouldn’t be counted. So, when Pro talks about shifting hundreds of thousands of troops from one location to another, I’m honestly just perplexed. What does that have to do with increasing military spending? I suppose you could argue that that increase is necessary in order to make such an effort plausible, but even if it is, that still runs hard into extra topicality. You aren’t debating what the military should do with the extra money, you’re dictating what the military should do, period. You set this topic. Stick to what you set.

In fact, I think I’m being generous by characterizing this as a topicality issue. Pro spends absolutely no time in his argument explaining why it is that extra funds are required in order to carry out these gargantuan troop invasions (note that these far outstrip D-Day, which comprised fewer than 200,000 personnel from multiple countries). Setting aside the fact that many of those 2 million soldiers Pro’s case is entirely reliant upon are not just a homogeneous pack of trained, outfitted troops capable of carrying out such an operation (seriously, this sounds insane, and I’m shocked the basic logistics were never questioned), if all of those soldiers are currently available, what is stopping the US military from invading these countries? Literally the only inherency Pro’s case is removing is a lack of financial support, yet he doesn’t explain why suddenly being flush with cash will suddenly make these invasions feasible. Con could have spent the entirety of the debate arguing that everything Pro is trying to do is non-unique to a world with more funds for the military, and almost all of Pro’s case would have basically been nullified. Pro could potentially have argued that those funds would make an invasion better somehow (I suppose that’s the point of the robots), but he spends scant little time doing that.

And that leads us to the robots. This is such a blipped out argument that it hardly functions. Pro just says that robot soldiers can be made, including zero warrants or evidence for that claim (seriously, show me a damn picture of the Skynet-driven robot apocalypse in Terminator, at least), and that having them solves for loss of life. We get no concept of what these soldiers will look like, how they will function, what kinds of roles they will play in combat, how many soldiers they could potentially replace, how much they will cost to make, why only the US will have them, or… well, basically anything else about them. Pro mentions this once in R3, using all of one sentence to explain an argument that requires far more. Con spends more time here.

I had imagined that, upon reaching the end of Pro’s arguments, I would find something solid to support the resolution and then would have to spend at least some time on Con’s points. But I don’t. His argument ranges from extra topical to lacking any and all inherency to barely mentioned points he never supports. Con talks about moving the goalposts, but Pro seems incapable of deciding what a goal even looks like in this debate. I think Con could have pointed a lot of this out, rather than getting bogged down in the details of Pro’s case. The shifting ground of Pro’s argument is still reason enough to award conduct to Con, though, so I do include that. Pro’s failure to meet his burden automatically requires that I award the debate to Con.