Imagine you are the leader of a large country, e.g. the U.S. You spend x Billion dollars every year on your military. What are your reasons for doing so?
I can think of two: 1)To protect the citizens of your country 2)To increase your political power.
Now objective 1) is met when you have sufficient military capabilities to deter any potential aggressors. But you don’t stop spending on the military then because either a)you have no control of production, or b)any excess spending meets objective 2).
Now assuming that the President has control over the defense budget, consider b). Increasing your military capabilities gives you the ability to pressurise states who have a lesser military, allowing you great influence both political and economic.
But at some point the amount you spend will fail to yield any more political power, the point of diminishing returns will be reached, and any further defense spending will be in vain. At this point the military is just sitting there, a huge investment which is not being used.
Surely this military has to be used in order to acheive further capital gains/political power, since any more expenditure is useless. And so the bombs are dropped. I suppose that it doesn’t matter that the cost of the bombs exceeds the value of the properties destroyed, as long as some, incidental, political aim is acheived.
If you are the leader of a large modern nation, any cause becomes economic.
*Why would you protect your citizens? They are your tax base, your producers, the people who man the industries, stores and farms. You keep them safe and happy, your nation prospers.
*Why would you gain new territory to the point of fighting a rival or your neighbor nation? To expand your real estate, to use new resources for your industry and agriculture, to house your citizens and to have new places to put your factories, farms, mines, and golf courses.
*What is the point of increasing political power? To control assets and resources. To be able to ustilize not only the productivity of your citizens but other nations citizens and resources as well to help your markets and factories that need raw materials that is not available to your people. To help gain new techniques in manufature and design to make your workforce more efficient and effective…
All wars are about profit and gain. To believe that wars are fought purely for noble reasons is unrealistic.
Noble reason: Free the Iraqi People
Real reason: Stabilize region. Remove terrorist and hostile threat. Improve Iraqi economy to lower world oil prices.
Economic, territorial, and political concerns seem to be closely intertwined factors in many wars throughout history, and the present doesn’t appear to me to be excepted. Try taking any one of those factors out of the equasion and one is likely to come up with a solution which does not compute.
But it would be unwise to omit two other factors which appear to play a role in many wars, “king-dildo-dipshit-stupid,” and “batshit-crazy.”
Meta-Gumble i must agree with you and i think your point is well-put. We dont spend all these tax dollars on an army “just in case”. It is more of an investment in future opportunities where war can be profitable in some way. If we dont have a noble reason for going to war, our political leaders will do thier best to manufacture one that can be construed as noble.
This is a great link that surprised the hell outa me!!!
The government would like us to believe that 17% of our taxes are spent on military. Ok 17% really is alot but i suppose most people can handle that right?
The truth is that this 17% isnt even close, it is actually between 40% and 50% depending on how it is calculated. The government version doesn’t take into account the interest that is aquired on the national debt through this spending, or payments such as veteran benefits. In essence, we continue to pay for a war LONG after it has been fought, it is a hidden cost that the government would like to keep hidden…
This link goes on to compare how this money is currently used to what it could actually do to help the world if spent on peaceful means. One of the comparisons: The money spent in 1 hour on the Iraq war could be used to improve, repair and modernize 20 schools. IMO our priorities are severely distorted and something has to be done.
Now when we spend all this money on our military, it becomes a total waste if we dont have a reason to use it, agreed? Bombs and planes and soldiers only way down the economy unless they can be used,still with me? It might be in some peoples best interest to use this idle military resource for some kind of economic gain, even if the value of the military used costs more than what is gained, make sense? Im gonna leave it at that and let you extrapolate whatever you can from here…
Slayer(ale) thank you for being so brutally honest and realistic, I think you really hit the nail on the head. War is realistically never driven by anything other than economy when you get right down to the facts…
I guess if that one person only cares about the economy, then everything that he does is based on an economic decision.
The model in the OP is exceedingly simplistic. It fails to take into account that a country’s legislature generally has the final say on defense budgets. According to one October 2000 article, "Over the past 20 years, Congress added $45.9 billion to President Carter’s defense proposals, cut Reagan’s by $216 billion, and cut Bush’s by $22.9 billion. So far, Congress added $73.7 billion to Clinton’s. "
I would still like for someone to check out this link, make comments etc… Does anyone think that our military spending is a little overboard? Do we really want to be the world leaders based on the fact that we spend the most on weapons and means of destruction? Any speculations on what this money could actually accomplish if spent another way? Should I start a new thread?
Not TRUE. Helen was a tourist attraction not to mention the wife of the Greek King. Abducting her had a severe impact on the greek tourist trade as well as the morale of its subjects.
Before Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships was so ugly, it launched ships away from Greece.
Saying that the cause of all war is economic is like saying the cause of all fruit is orchards, and then defining any solitary apple trees or berry bushes to be orchards in their own right in order to shoehorn reality into the theory. Furthermore, it tells you virtually nothing about the nature of fruit that wasn’t already obvious.
One must remember that the causes of wars do not simply lie with heads of state or businessmen. Are their motivations often economic? Certainly. But what of the man who fights and dies? Often, he fights for a paycheck, or for spoils of war. But why does a draftee fight (or refuse to)? Is not his motivation as significant as all the rest?
Finally, I should like to note that the argument as presented seems inherently flawed by being incomplete, as there is loads of anthropological evidence to indicate that war predates the state. (Yea, even before good ol’ Helen.)
Why is it that people so easily rush to explain war by a single causative factor but don’t feel the need to explain other human activities in the same way? What causes love? Hate? Friendship? Murder? If one thinks about the economic argument, it really comes down to selfishness. So I guess if you’re feeling particularly cynically, you can explain all human motivation by selfishness. At least that would simplify the teaching of psychology, history, philosophy, politics, economics…
Good point, Kniz, but wouldn’t Paris’ actions be covered by what SofaKing colorfully termed “king-dildo-dipshit-stupid”? I’ve never quite understood the psychology of Paris in deliberately choosing a woman who is already married to someone else. (It doesn’t sound like romantic love the way Homer describes it)
The US spends only about 4-5% on defence, far less than was spent during the Cold War, I think even without adjusting for inflation. Honestly, saying the US spends half its income on the military is like saying I spent half my income of a video game after taking out all that money for food, rent, college, charity, and so forth. Its not honest, in my opinion.
Regardless, economics is so tied into every factor in society its impossible to have a war which doesn’t impact in some way. But, for example, Japan attacked Pearl harbor with an immediate cause that the US was having a trade embargo. BUt the more basic reason was that the military of Japan wanted to establish themselves as the supreme Empire of Asia - a profoundly political goal with only secondary economic implications. Likewise, the American embargo was founded upon the political goal of forcing Japan to cool off. Also, note that the US concentrated its war effort on Germany, which posed no real economic threat that the former European imperial states did not.
The protesters are wrong that this is “all about oil.” However, I will agree that we are hoping for an economic outcome. After all, America likes to trade. We really like to trade with first-world democracies–with some notable exceptions. So, if we do this right, eventually we will be trading with an oil-producing (plus whatever else manages to come out of Iraq) first-world Middle-Eastern democracy, which is generally better than trading with a dictator.
I don’t really have time to validate your web sites magic accounting practices. I tend to discount any web site that makes outrageous claims based on taking public information and applying their own methodology to it.
Look, the entire premise of this thread is simplistic and incorrect. Countries do not go to war to blow up extra resources, justify military spending or any other such conspiracy nonsense. If anything it’s the opposite. As a nation develops economicly, it becomes more important to defend its interests against aggressors who want to take away that wealth. Just as a wealthy person my have more security than his poorer, crime ridden neighbors.
There are economic causes to war. There are idealogical and religeous causes. There are power and cultural causes. All are closely linked. Much of the Israel-Palestinian problem is because of religeous and cultural differences. But do you think the Palestinians would be in constant revolt if they all had jobs and homes as good as the Israelis? Probably not.
So to sum up, yes a great deal if not all of war is because of economics. But not for the reasons the OP gives.
On a less jovial note, from what I recall, the whole Helen of Troy story was economic as well: Whoever controls the dardanels (or whatever they are called), controls the passage to the black sea. It’s all about trade and economy, the whole love story is just a nice bonus to have a noble justification.
I think ** Purplefloyd ** was refering to the amount the goverment spends on military spending, not the percentage of GDP, which you seem to be using ** smiling bandit **, though I do think the article Purplefloyd uses has some pretty shady accounting practises to get a 40% number for military spending. Also, the actual amount the the US spends on the military is roughly 3.2% as of 1999; it has risen slightly since then. of the GDP; IIRC, during the Cold War is was sometimes in the the 10% of GDP range.
Except you’re forgetting something, one can’t create an effective military out of thin air if it’s needed rapidly. The skills required to have a modern, functioning military are so great that a nation simply must have a standing army. One can argue that if the US shut down it’s military services the rest of the world would follow suit, and one would be wrong.
While the US wouldn’t face a threat from much of the world, there would be someone out there, who’d see it as a prime opportunity to attack the US. So instead of dismantling their military, they’d build it up and launch an attack on us. At which point, the US would have to engage in a desperate scramble to build up its military infrastructure in order to protect itself. During that time, many lives would be lost, and indeed, the US itself might be lost, along with the very freedoms we treasure.
Aside from which, the US military is probably not cost effective as a conquering force, since it has not, in fact, been used to conquer new territory or colonies for the Empire. Otherwise Germany and Japan would be minor client states who must buy from America and sell to America.
