[QUOTE=QuickSilver]
Here’s the US Military budget report (pdf) and distribution of funds. On page 83 you can find how the amounts are distributed in the past few years. The majority of the budget is not salaries and benefits, which are roughly 20% of the entire budget. Procurement and R&D is more like 25%. Operations & maint is about 30%.
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Re-read what I wrote. I didn’t claim the majority was just salaries and benefits…I said ‘majority of the defense budget goes to salaries and benefits for those service, training (and expendables…bullets and beans) as well as maintenance of existing equipment (I suppose that could be viewed as ‘manufacturers of weapons and equipment and munitions and military tech’…in a way)’. And that IS the majority of the budget. The point being, your assertion/question that ‘Very little is going to the actual soldiers’ is incorrect. A rather large percentage of the budget for any given year goes directly to pay for salaries and benefits, as well as retirement for former soldiers. Maintenance of equipment and training also take a chunk.
The lamented MIC is the best thing America has going for it nowadays. Ain’t much else to brag about. Why pull the rug out? Because it’s the humane, moral thing to do? Since when did that ever help anything?
Stranger: Did you buy those crocodile tears for a second? I’m looking forward to Fog of War 2 where Rumsfeld can wax poetic about known unknowns.
Exactly. We don’t want to be useless like China or Europe. But someday the U.S. won’t have full spectrum dominance over every square inch of the Earth’s surface and we won’t be able to garrison the world with hundreds of bases. Then what will we have to stay relevant? Maybe our sophisticated culture?
[QUOTE=marshmallow]
Exactly. We don’t want to be useless like China or Europe. But someday the U.S. won’t have full spectrum dominance over every square inch of the Earth’s surface and we won’t be able to garrison the world with hundreds of bases. Then what will we have to stay relevant? Maybe our sophisticated culture?
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China, who is rapidly building up their military and increasing their budget…and, probably coincidentally, pushing things in their own backyard lately. Europe…I presume you mean Western Europe, since the Soviets…er, I mean Russians…seem to already be pretty active. Western Europe then, who has the vast and mighty ability to deter aggression in their own backyard, as evidence by how well they defused the situation in the Ukraine and prevented the Russians from snapping up the Crimea (and start making noises about the rest of the Ukraine, as well as Estonia and any other place where there are poor, persecuted Russian speakers). And obviously, the fear of the mighty US worked it’s magic as well, allowing us to ‘spectrum dominance over every square inch of the Earth’s surface’…
…Oh, wait…
Oh, to be sure, it will be such a moral and humane world when the US finally steps down from it’s place of dominance and allows the rest of the world to live free and unburdened by us. You can already see how much better things will be if you squint hard enough.
This is being addressed in subsequent posts, but I was using “soldiers” as short hand for "people employed by the military (directly or indirectly). I didn’t mean to imply that soldiers are getting rich, but that ultimately the cost of the military is directly correlated to the number of people working for the military.
Let’s not forget an additional, non-trivial 158,753 for Overseas Contingent Operations - whatever that entails.
And yes, while bullets, beans and boots are necessary for the welfare of the soldier, I do not see them as real benefits for the soldier. If you’re sending the guy overseas for a small stipend to risk his life, the least you can do is feed, clothes and arm the guy and pay for his medical expenses after he gets his limbs blown off on one of those Overseas Contingent Operations.
I’m simply saying, let’s not sit and pretend these guys make out like bandits. The average civilian consultant doing some database management for the Army’s SAP procurement system is making a fuckton more money than the soldier whose new boots he helps make sure get procured. And that is part of the cost of the operations budget, which carries very little ‘benefit’ to the actual soldier.
All that to say… there is room for reducing these costs if the US is more judicial in it’s OCO’s.
And while we’re at it, we are not fighting the Chinese or the Russians or the other "enemies’ that you claim are building up their armies, are we? But we’re still spending tremendous amounts of resources without dealing with these potential threats, as you see them. So if we’re spending about the right amount on our military, or even not enough… is it possible that we’re spending it fighting the wrong enemies? (Not that I’m suggesting we go to war with anyone else at this point.)
[QUOTE=QuickSilver]
I’m simply saying, let’s not sit and pretend these guys make out like bandits. The average civilian consultant doing some database management for the Army’s SAP procurement system is making a fuckton more money than the soldier whose new boots he helps make sure get procured. And that is part of the cost of the operations budget, which carries very little ‘benefit’ to the actual soldier.
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Having actually been in the military (the Navy), you aren’t saying anything I didn’t already know. No, your average soldier doesn’t make a lot of money. The point, however, is that the majority of the budget goes to PAYING for those soldiers and all the stuff they need. All of which DOES benefit the soldiers…including your database manager making a ‘fuckton’ more money than said soldiers.
Obviously I disagree. Could we shave some money from the military’s budget? Certainly we could. We could even save money on some of the programs that are sub-optimal. But real savings? I think that based on our current requirements, we aren’t meeting them NOW…so, I disagree we could or should make more substantial cuts than our already flattening of the military budget. YMMV.
See, I look at our spending in a completely different way. To paraphrase from karate Kid, we spend lots of money so we don’t have to fight…and when/if we DO have to fight, we are so dominant that no one in their right mind wants to tangle with us or push us to the point where we decide to fight.
I think part of the reason both China and Russia are starting to push things in their regions is directly related to the down shift in US military spending, that hasn’t been correspondingly up shifted by our stalwart European (or other) allies. It’s created at least the beginning of a power vacuum, and basically has allowed countries to seriously contemplate doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do. I mean, the Europeans are obviously not going to push things over the Crimea…even if they could back it up, they won’t because it’s not worth it. The US? We could, certainly, but it’s not worth it for us (it’s not in OUR backyard after all). The only thing that would have prevented Russia from doing what they did was pure deterrence…and, quite obviously, the US ability to deter that sort of thing is waning. Cost to benefit. Countries are now looking at such things, and weighing the fact that the cost to the US outweighs the benefit from our perspective. That allows countries like Russia to make new calculations wrt their own external perceived needs.
What “crocodile tears” are those? Did you actually watch the film or read McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam? Far from erecting a wall of denial of responsibility, McNamara is very clear that, as one of the architects of the US strategy in the Viet Nam conflict, he made significant errors of judgment and otherwise failed to advise and influence both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to de-escalate the conflicts. He blatantly says, “We were wrong. But we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy cost.”
McNamara was an intelligent, rational man who acknowledges that intelligence and rationality are not enough to protect against the misapplication of military force in a global context and the unnecessary deaths of thousands or even millions of people. His open and vocal opposition to the recent war in Iraq is a testament to the lessons learned over a life of being intimately involved in many world conflicts and admitting the mistakes that he was personally responsible for. But one gets the impression that the people who seek to vilify him instead of acknowledging the lessons he provides that no apology short of ritual seppuku would be an acceptable statement, and that his assignment of responsibility for the expansion of the Viet Nam conflict to Johnson (who is on record as vigorously supporting war efforts despite counsel from many sectors to look for ways to extract the United States from Southeast Asia) is somehow a way to deflect personal responsibility.
Paint devil horns on McNamara if you like–certainly, he is at least as responsible for Viet Nam as Colin Powell is for Afghanistan and Iraq–but he was pretty candid about his failures as a Cabinet advisor. The greater criticism might be levied about his tenure as president of the World Bank and influencing the IMF to show preference to nations which promoted birth control (despite his personal Catholic beliefs) and what the resulting debt load has done to post-colonial Africa, but even then there are complexities to the situation that cannot be addressed at less than book length.
If you can’t learn from the lessons McNamara provides, and his criticism of American history and his personal mistakes (“What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, military, or political power unilaterally. If we’d followed that rule in Viet Nam, we wouldn’t have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britian, not France. If we can’t persuade nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”) then you are incapable of making good decisions for the future, regardless of political bent.
I hear what you’re saying and much as I’d like to see that OCO budget go to infrastructure and education, etc… I do realize that we live in the real world where being the toughest guy in town has its benefits. Many of which you described.
But I don’t know if I accept on face value the claim that because our spending dropped for the past 3 years, that suddenly Russia and China became emboldened. I think they’ve become emboldened before that and precisely because the US has been such an overwhelmingly dominant player militarily. I believe they rightfully got a little worried and started hitting the gym to bulk up, to be able to discourage the town tough guy from intimidating them with such overwhelming strength.
The US military spending is 39% of the whole world’s mil spending. China’s is 9.5%. Russia’s is 5.2% of the total.
Another source says China is increasing its mil spending by 12% of its 9.5%, not by 12% of the world’s total. Now, why should we be worried about China spending less than 25% of our own? China and Russia are pikers compared to our bloated mil budget.
I’ve never been convinced by the spinoff justification for spending money on a particular project. If you want freeze dried food and tempurpedic mattresses, there are much cheaper ways of getting them than going to the moon. A far better use of resources would be to support basic research or provide grants, prizes to inventors.
Except no one would have paid the tens of billions of dollars of research and development to produce and deploy the Global Positioning System if there were not some stratgetic need, and yet a multi-billion dollar commercial industry with safety, resource utilization, and agricultural benefits that have resulted. I"m not saying that military R&D is the post facto most efficent way to have achieved a particular objective, but many of the capabilities which have resulted from military needs (which are not assessed on financial return) have gone to provide enormous financial benefit and unforeseen commercial development.
They are only prima facie convincing. There is no great cosmic barrier to directly investing in research for technologies that increase quality of life except for Congress, and perhaps that is the main problem here.
There may not be a “cosmic barrier” but getting either the government or (especially) private companies to invest tens of billions of dollars in research and infrastructure which may not return direct benefits to the producer is a very, very difficult sell, particularly when the commercial applications may not be evident at the time. On the other hand, justifying enormous budgets for military applications despite the fact that the operational capability may be decades away is almost ridiculously easy, e.g. missile defense, the networking capability underlying the SAGE system, directed energy weapons, et cetera. Nobody is going to fund the tens of billions of dollars of research into an enormously powerful space-based laser just for the sake of making an armored Swiss cheese, but once it exists (regardless of the absurdity of the justification) it could be used for any number of other peaceful purposes such as asteroid-seeking LIDAR, remote propulsion, high bandwidth communications for missions to the outer solar system, et cetera.
That may not be just or fair, but it is indisputably true. Returning to the example of GPS, it is a technology which has benefited the public directly in ways most people aren’t even aware (such as search and rescue, surveying, agricultural optimization, et cetera) but there is no way any commercial entity could justify the initial cost of establishing a constellation or recoup costs from all the users without making the system unduly cumbersome. The military justification for global navigation, however, was an easy pill to swallow, and the later opening of the full capabilities to civilian users has resulted in a massive industry.
It’s a bunch of asinine, reality-free broken-window pseudo-thinking that rests on the ludicrous and insane assumption that the way things did play out, is necessarily the only way things could have played out.
I realize that. That’s why I think it’s a legislative issue. Rather than funding the military to the tune of 600 B and NASA to 17 B, moving some of those funds over would be closer to the kind of research I’m looking for, for example. Also, like another poster said, more research grants would also be a plus.