But it’s not a coincidence that the most influential country in the world is always one of the countries with a lot of military power. Paying for a big military is part of the price you pay for having influence in the world.
And the US has to stand ever vigilant of the existential threat posed by Canada and its dreams of lebensraum, eh ? 
Why indeed? Great Britain, France, and Italy had strong national reasons to support the Libyan revolution which the USA did not share. The USA was forced to help because it has made itself indispensable to NATO, and thus to NATO members. Then this was used to embarrass Obama by putting him in the position of interfering in Mediterranean affairs without Congressional approval, in violation of the War Powers Act (and thus in violation of the constitution, which vests war-making authority in Congress).
In order to avoid this in future, we should dramatically reduce our contribution to NATO, even if we don’t leave it entirely.
The next time some psycho righty accuses the SDMB of being insanely left wing beyond the average American, I will point to this thread where everyone supports perpetual global warfare and killing foreigners at great expense to the American people to further the business interests of a few already rich people and corporations.
Leftwing my ass.
Although I do not like the idea of America’s military being as big as it is, it remains that it is part of the reason it has so much influence, and why it is able to be so good at diplomacy. It’s like a Mafioso going in to make a business deal with an armed guy standing behind him, the deal will be a lot easier to make. And it also needs to make sure it has a secure way to get oil, so it needs military in the Middle East. I do not support this in any way but I understand why America needs it.
XT however seems to have the idea that the US is into some sort of international conflict resolution, or that it would be unhappy to side with a new evil big bully if they appeared. But the US has never had any trouble in being friends with dictators. Now you hear Obama talking on TV about how unfortunate it is that the dictators are killing all those people, but they’ve been doing that for years it’s just the average American was less aware of it. And whilst all these people were being cruel, evil dictators America still managed to be friends with them.
Regarding the loss of jobs for military contractors, that would be unlikely given the amount of conflict likely to present itself when the US pulls out. The military contractors will be more than happy to fund 2 sides of the same war. They had nothing against providing the Egyptian military with weapons to deal with the uprising.
Yep, I support health care, a right to choose, same sex marriage, taxing the rich, and liberal killing of foreigners. Thats why they call me a liberal - 'cuz I am a racist imperialist.
:rolleyes: The USA is an oil-producing country that refuses to undertake even very basic steps in fuel efficiency because it can abuse its military-industrial power to prop up friendly dictators in other oil-producing countries. You have cause and effect sort of backwards.
And without US anti-Communism and the rest of the First World letting the US murder most of the Latin American left, the world would look far, far better in Latin American eyes.
Well, actually, those are two of the considerations in the complex of American “needs and goals.” 
Admittedly, the American record is mixed and we’ve sometimes supported some repressive dictatorships. But you act like there’s a better alternative.
If China or Russia was filling America’s role in world politics, do you think things would be better? It would no longer be a case of dictatorships being supported sometimes - dictatorships would be the standard model.
Or let’s ignore countries like Russia and China. How about other countries of the west? Putting aside the examples of when Germany and Japan sought to become world powers (spoiler: it didn’t go well) look at how liberal democracies like Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium acted when they were running third world countries and compare it to the American record.
I’m not saying the United States has done a perfect job as a world power. But I do think we deserve credit for doing a pretty good job and being one of the most responsible and least oppressive countries as a world power.
Our military spending is a lot more than $600 billion. This cite says it is $1.030–$1.415 trillion. Other sources give similar numbers.
What bugs me about debates on this subject is all the scolding about how China and Russia are going to step into the power vacuum, the world is going to be a different place with a boot on our necks, the world will erupt in war ‘without’ us, yada yada. I think all this is just nonsense. We can dramatically cut our military spending without much in the way of increased risk at all.
Here’s a chart of just the DoD portion of defense spending. If we take the step of paring it back to simply 1999 levels, for starters, does anyone seriously believe it will be disabling?
I suppose if one is free to decide that FBI agents and diplomats are actually part of the military, I suppose one can produce any figure that you’d like and call it the defense budget. I’m surprised that cite excludes spending on highways (which were created to ease the transportation of military goods) and food stamps (which some members of the military receive). My figure of what we spend on the military is what we actually spend on the military, not an obviously manipulated figure designed to look as large as possible.
It would disable our current foreign and security policy. It would be impossible to maintain our current commitments and halve the budget at the same time. If you want a different defense policy, fine. But you can’t just halve the budget of any government agency and have them do the same job: that’s something that Tea Partiers need to learn, too.
No there’s no better alternative, and I’m not saying what America does is wrong, just that I don’t like it. It’s a standard Machiavellian government, built upon convincing the people that what you’re doing is the right thing. And they have been successful as a super-power which means that for their purposes they’re doing it right. But there’s no way I’m giving America any credit, fair enough they did what they had to do in order to become a super-power and stay that way, but they still committed many inhumane things along the way. It’s like saying “well at least give me a little credit for killing the guy quickly so he felt no pain”.
But now we’re going off-topic, regarding the OP what I was saying is that the US cannot significantly decrease it’s military power whilst retaining it’s status as a super-power irrelevant of how moral or immoral it is.
Robert Heinlein once said “The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment.”
Military supremacy has a deterrent effect. When was the world safer? Back during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were approximately equal powers? No, the world was much more dangerous and repressive back then (and we were spending a higher percentage on defense).
If we spend seven hundred billion dollars and it prevents a major war from happening, then it was money well spent.
Then you’ve missed my point. I’m saying that the United States is not a “standard Machiavellian government” - that we have a better record as a world power than most other (and arguably all other) countries have had. If you dispute this, then produce the evidence.
And if you can’t or don’t dispute this, then you’re just arguing that the best isn’t good enough to meet your standards. That may be true but in such a case, it probably means you have unrealistic standards.
I don’t doubt the figures are debatable, but I don’t think a wiki site on the defense budget is ‘manipulated’ to look a certain way. Look at their breakdown- they don’t include the entire FBI, but ‘defense-related’ FBI. And so on. It doesn’t look absurd to me, and the numbers match other estimates I’ve seen. You’ll have to wait a day for me to dig up the other source I have in mind though.
Again, this is the same script that is always played when the discussion turns to cutting the defense budget. Let’s mix it up and get very specific about what is ‘disabled’. The military does a lot of things- let’s make a list and go through the effects of cutting this and that. And please don’t compare me to a Tea Partier- my views on this aren’t driven by blind ideology.
I’m pretty sure I know what you are referring to: it’s a table that includes pretty much the same items as the link. Here’s the thing: we often hear some people saying that the “war in terrorism” should actually be about law enforcement and cooperation wih other countries, and NOT the military. But when those same folks want to prove a pre-conceived point about “hidden” defense spending, suddenly FBI agents and diplomats are counted as military spending. It’s a throughly transparent tactic.
Cutting the military by half would mean a substantial shrinking of overseas presence. We’d have fewer bases and ships. That would encourage Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea to increase defense spending to keep up with the threats they face. China would run roughshod over its neighbors like Vietnam and the Philippines, who dispute the ownership of various atolls and shoals. Cutting foreign aid (if you really believe that is defense spending, which is silly to me) would leave us with fewer tools to seek cooperation with other countries to address common threats (like terrorism in the developing world) or bolster other foreign policy goals (like support for Israel). I think those courses of action are dangerous and short sighted.
Finally, though this is a less compelling point for me, cutting military spending by half would have a significant economic impact or the US: it has been estimated that a 10% cut to defense that might occur in January 2013 would result in one million lost direct and indirect jobs.
I think there is room to cut the defense budget, but we shouldn’t do so without considering the effects. Simply looking at big numbers of billions of dollars and declaring that it is wasteful - like how John Bolton declared that half of the UN Building could be vaporized and nobody would know the difference - is the type of thinking that is currently popular within the Tea Party. Just because you’re applying it to a differen government agency doesn’t turn it into sound thinking.
Read Killing Hope someday.
Watch The Battle of Algiers someday.
The proposed F-15 Silent Eagle, for one, or the F generation F/A-18. Mostly it’s canting the tails, applying absorbent coatings, shielding the intakes and exhausts and modernizing the fire control systems.
Boeing funded most of the development of the Silent Eagle privately and even buying new airframes would supposedly have cost only $100 million. I suspect Lockheed would have pursued a similar upgrade program for the F-16 if it didn’t already have the F-22 and F-35 contracts.
Well I’m not trying to pull a fast one, the defense number looked wrong and the results I googled looked like what I expected. What specifically do you reject in their breakdown? Is the Department of Homeland Security defense or not, for instance?
For one thing I think the OP goes a little too far. ‘Defense’ just isn’t the same as isolationism. For one example, as distasteful as our relationship with Pakistan is, I don’t think we can abandon it. Afghanistan makes some kind of sense in context with a stable Pakistan when it makes any sense at all, and I don’t think we can just pull up stakes their either. Two examples of things I would not subject to the buzzsaw because of the consequences.
Cut by half? I don’t know, I’ve thrown around the number $500 billion/year in cuts, sometimes it is $300 billion, in any case this was taking the overall defense budget as ~$1.3 trillion.
My main gist is that we have quite a lot of force to throw around and can threaten anybody we want with, say, 70% of it. It might not happen very fast, as I do understand some of these commitments have a contractual nature and can’t just be cut off like the way the Tea Partiers threatened the debt ceiling/national credit rating.
That is certainly worth considering. I guess it depends on how it is dealt with. Plan ahead and we can transition people into something else- a big transportation/student loan/etc. bill just passed that looks to create a lot of jobs for instance. I don’t advocate abandoning military readiness, but when it goes overboard like I think it has today we could generate more value having more people transition out of the military and into something else.
Of course I want to consider the effects, I never said otherwise. I suggested making a list and looking at the effects of cutting this and that fer cryin’ out loud. So I think we’re talking past each other a little bit but I can’t blame you much considering the nutjob political atmosphere these days.
Here’s a specific example: As I understand it, military pensions are available immediately upon retirement with enough years of service. Most other careers you have to wait until age 57 or later to collect a pension, if you get one at all. I don’t begrudge military guys their pensions, and I think anyone injured in a deployment for instance ought to be eligible for the early pension, but in other cases I think this could be adjusted to be more in line with other careers. Less money spent on pensions, no real loss in readiness. Yeah, decrease the benefits and less people will enlist, but cutting recruitment is another of my proposals anyway…
Robert Heinlein is an idiot and a hack, so it is fitting he would say something so stupid.