Let’s not quibble over WWII – speaking as a human being (who also was born of Jewish parents, though that should be considered irrelevant in comparison to the fact that as a human, I am capable of both disgust and empathy), the fact that Naziism was dealt a great defeat is something that citizens of the world should consider to be a freedom that was protected. It’s pretty myopic to argue that WWII was not a fight for freedom, regardless whether or not you think that American freedom was protected or not. We are human beings first and foremost. And many people I know are children of European refugees who I am CERTAIN are grateful for the freedom that our troops helped them attain.
The United States arranged to involve itself in Korea and Vietnam despite having no real business being there.
On the other hand, I can’t come up with a coherent defense of the claim as it related to Afghanistan. I suppose with the benefit of hindsight invading was kind of pointless as bin Laden continued to elude us for another 10 years, but that doesn’t mean it was a “made-up scuffle.”
I think this is largely correct, at least for the United States. Certainly other militarizes in other countries have been in a position to fight for their actual freedom (thinking the UK and the Soviet Union in WWII).
The United States have fought for other peoples freedom - Europe and the Soviet Union in WWII, clearly South Korea in the Korean War.
While it’s a cliche, the United States has fought for our “way of life” I believe. If the United States became isolationist again after WWII or frankly now, the world would have been / would become dominated by the Soviet Union, or China. YMMV on this, but that isn’t a world that most of the west (at least) would want. A power vacuum will be filled by someone, and we’d have to ask who should that someone be. While the US hasn’t always done a perfect job, I think we are much better than the alternatives.
We fought for our freedom too in WW2.
Yes, indeed.
You can’t analyze the cost of the U.S. military without considering the missions it engages in.
The first thing you have to realize is that because the U.S. is isolated, it has to project its military power across oceans. That is incredibly expensive. Having a military presence in the South China Sea means floating carrier groups, and also means huge logistical tails of ships moving back and forth. Maintaining deterrents in places like South Korea means stationing tens of thousands of soldiers in foreign lands, with all the costs and entanglements that brings. To support its allies, the U.S. needs many carrier groups, and they cost many billions of dollars each to construct and maintain. A single carrier group costs about 2.5 million dollars per day just to operate. The last carrier cost 12.5 billion dollars.
So is it worth it? What would happen if America suddenly withdrew from the world and just maintained a token force at home?
Well, let’s start with alliances. All those smaller countries that are currently allied with the U.S. for their military protection will be forced to ally with someone else. A certain Vlad Putin would be happy to take that up, as he did in Syria when the U.S. ‘led from behind’. Now he’s dug in like a tick in the middle east and is going to be very difficult to dislodge.
Today, every bad actor in the world that wants to invade a neighbor or destroy an enemy has to calculate just how far they can go before America becomes involved. Take that away, and Putin would probably already have taken back the Baltics and possibly the Ukraine and other places.
Then there’s non-proliferation. Absent a U.S. protective umbrella, Japan and South Korea would be armed with Nukes. Taiwan almost certainly would as well. Europe would start to look like an armed camp again as countries would suddenly be responsible for their own defense and would have to build up their militaries. Smaller states that can’t afford large militaries to defend themselves would move towards WMD or nukes to level the playing field.
And without a non-nuclear deterrence to bad guys across oceans, the odds become much greater that the U.S. would eventually face a crisis that would tempt it to use nuclear weapons.
No one thinks the U.S. would be in imminent danger of invasion. Certainly not in the very short term. But since you don’t have the military to oppose them, what happens if Russia starts building missiles in Venezuela in exchange for economic aid? What if Cuba does the same? What if China starts making deals in South America, and as part of the deal they start trying to control the sea lanes and the Panama canal? What are you about to do if over a decade or so China keeps building up its presence in Central and South America until it has airbases, tanks, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the region? What do you do if they invade Costa Rica, full of Americans and Canadians?
This is a globalized world. If America were cut off from global trade by an aggressive enemy willing to sink ships with subs and blockade ports, its economy would collapse. If America were put in a position were it could be embargoed or have its necessary goods strategically cut off any time an enemy wanted to do so, it would have to capitulate to all kinds of demands. Or threaten the use of Nukes. I don’t want to live in a world kept stable by constant nuclear brinksmanship, because it takes only one error before we are all screwed.
There have been three eras in history where the world was relatively peaceful - during the Pax Romana after Augustus became Caesar, during the Pax Britannia when Britain controlled the seas and had a vast colonial empire, and during the current Pax Americana. And in each case, once that overwhelming military might created a lasting peace, the people soon forgot how hard peace is to attain and resented the cost required to attain it, and began to lobby to have the military shrink because it was ‘unnecessary’. And at least in the first two cases, the end result was a return to violence and conflict on a horrific scale.
The third case has yet to play out, and I suggest we not make the same mistake.
We can argue about the margins - whether the budget should be a hundred billion larger or smaller. But the U.S. will always need to have the most military spending in the world due to its unique circumstances, and if it fails to do so, the result will be more war, more tyranny, and more human misery.
It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of U.S. defense spending cycles back into the U.S. economy. Sure, that doesn’t justify pork or waste, and no doubt some of it goes into the pockets of fat cats, but it is not as if the money is hemorrhaging into foreign nations, as if the United States writes a $700 billion check and loses it annually.
I’d be willing to say that during the time since the end of the civil war (and certainly since the end of WWII) around, oh, maybe as much as 5% of the US armed forced have protected american freedom, because I’m pretty confident that a US military with 1/20th the funding and manpower could have been just as effective at deterring invasion. The other 95% of our military is a complete waste of money that exists to serve porkbarrel and megacorporation-type interests, and warhawk-type ambitions/delusions.
Regarding whether any specific military man is part of the 5% or the 95%, if a given soldier insists they’re part of the 5%, they’re in the 95%. The same goes for any soldier or group of soldiers that anyone else thinks defends american freedom - they’re all in the 95% too.
IANAE but even if the money stays in the U.S. economy, that does not mean that military expenditures create economic value.
True. I’m just saying it’s not like flushing $700 billion down the drain, which is what some pacifists make it sound like.
Of course, the same applies for welfare, stimulus, etc. and conservatives often yelp about that.
Please re-read the post #85 by Sam Stone --immediately above yours.
The purpose of the US army is not to deter invasion.There are lots of ways to lose your freedom OTHER than enemy soldiers walking through your streets.
I assume you own a car, and enjoy the freedom to drive wherever you want. Which means that you buy new tires sometimes. Where do you think the rubber in those tires comes from–Idaho?
If an enemy wanted to blockade the Panama canal, they only need one or two ships and a couple hundred soldiers.
Thank the US military for your tires.
And everything else you buy at Walmart.
A couple of other points important to this debate:
Before WWII, the U.S. had let its military atrophy so much that it was training their soldiers with wooden rifles. The U.S. fighters in the inventory were things like the P-26 Peashooter, a fixed-gear, open seat fighter that was hopelessly outmatched by a dozen other fighters the axis powers were flying. But within just a couple of years the U.S. had caught up and in many cases surpassed the designs of their enemy. Design cycles of the technology of the time was measured in months, and an airplane could go from an initial design to prototype in weeks, and production in months.
And when you needed to ramp up production, you could take over auto factories and other big industrial facilities, and train housewives to rivet up airplanes. The U.S. therefore managed to produce about 300,000 aircraft during the war, and could have gone even higher if necessary.
But those days are long gone. The development time for modern weapons systems can be measured in decades. And worse, the great advantage of the U.S. military is that it is highly integrated and works together very tightly. You can’t just throw away pieces of it and expect it to function well.
The reality is that you cannot focus a military budget on just the threats as they exist today. You have to make sure that potential threats in the future don’t arise when your enemy is a generation ahead of you in technology. You’ll never catch up in time. So the only thing you can do is to continue matching weapon system for weapon system and maintain a huge R&D budget. And then you actually have to build the weapons. If you put the plans for the F-35 on a shelf and a war breaks out, you won’t be able to stand up assembly lines and produce them in time for them to be of any use.
All this means that military planners err on the side of too much than too little, to account for future risk. This is prudent, as the most expensive thing in the world is a military that wasn’t big enough to stop a war, or if started, win it.
As we’ve progressed through this thread, it really depends on what we mean by “freedom.” If we mean freedom by protecting the borders of the United States from armed attack, I’d say we didn’t really have much of a threat from the war of 1812 through the 1950’s with the advent of nuclear weapons. (And yes, I’m including WWII, where there wasn’t much of a threat to the borders of the US then either.)
If we are using a larger definition of freedom, “making the world safe for democracy” and all that, then the military has indeed preserved our freedoms, either though direct military intervention (WWII, the cold war, for example) or ensuring that there wasn’t a void that someone else in the world was going to fill, namely the Soviet Union and China today. There are bad actors on the world stage that the US military has keep in check merely by being in place.
One can argue about the side of the US military today, but to state we could do much with a budget of 5% of what it is now is absurd. The military was actually reduced over the last few years is real dollars, and is in the lowest point as a percentage of GDP in decades. So the military is getting smaller you matter how you calculate it. The question going forward is what do you want it to do? What definition of freedom are you going to use?
Yes, you’d have to be incredibly naive to think that the Axis would have been content with Europe and Asia and never have threatened the United States.
And even if you believed that no other power in our history would ever have considered physically invading the U.S., Americans’ economic security*, freedom to travel etc. have been at stake in other conflicts, actual and avoided.
So while you can question the size of the military establishment and whether it should be employed in specific circumstances, it’s foolish to think it never mattered.
Sometime I should collect and list all the “goshdarnit, the military/veterans get too much credit and I’m really peeved about it” threads that have appeared on the Dope. 
*the establishment of the U.S. Navy back in the day largely occurred because trade and economic security of the fledgling country were threatened by outside forces, not least of which were the Barbary pirates.
This is an unserious comment. 5% of the military budget is about 30 billion dollars. That would be about 7% of China’s military busget. It would be less than half of Russia, India, or Saudi Arabia’s military budget. It would put the U.S behind France, The UK, Germany, and Japan by about a third, and would put it in the same ballpark as the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Australia.
To meet that goal, the U.S. would have to remove all forces from around the world, scuttle most of its Navy and air force. The opeqtions and maintenance budget alone is currently over $200 billion, before you even fund weapons sustem purchase and development. The military’s research budget alone is more than double the amount you want to give them for everything.
Suggesting the U.S. military could ever have been effective for anything on 5% of its budget is just simply nuts.
I would settle for a 5% reduction every year for ten years.
A plain read of my post would imply that I’m talking about manpower, not budget, but nonetheless.
Would you agree that we could lop off, oh, 50% of the manpower/budget, then?
Well, there was no threat as we got in there and won. If the allies had lost if the USA refused to fight since we didnt have any armed services- that would be a different issue.
A plain reading of your post would indicate that you were talking about both funding and manpower. Because those are your literal words.
And no I don’t agree that you could just lop off 50% of the military and still have it serve the needs of the country. On what do you base this? An actual study that shows where cuts can be made? Or just your general feeling that military is bad and should be cut in half because less is better?
It comes in part from a general feeling that I’ve heard tales of us buying large amounts of expensive military hardware we don’t know what to do with (tanks, planes and the like), and the fact that we seem to be able to be able to afford various prolonged unjustified and unnecessary wars of aggression. Presumably those wars weren’t free, so if we hadn’t done them we could afford not to have spent that much.
The US would be in breach of it’s treaty obligations to NATO if it cut it’s military budget in half. Whilst that would simply put it on par with most other NATO countries, it’s still not a good idea.