This is a step in the right direction, though I think it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The United States only has 5 percent of the world’s population, but we account for 50 percent of the world’s military spending. Nonetheless, it’s good to see that the insane post 9/11 military buildup is finally going to start shrinking.
Every dollar we spend on the military carries with it an Opportunity Cost. Money spent on weapons and soldiers is money that could be spent on other things, like humanitarian aid to other countries, or healthcare for our citizens.
Dwight D. Eisenhower summed it up best when he said:
We need a bigger cut than this. Tax cuts for the wealthy are said to amount to $700 billion over ten years. Cut in half for five years, add 10%, and that’s $385 billion to cut.
I wonder if this is going to remain politically uncontroversial. It’s overdue as far as I’m concerned and I agree that much, much larger cuts are called for. I’ve been saying for a while - purely as an uninformed ballpark figure - that it could probably be halved without anybody’s life being endangered.
I don’t like it. It’s all well and good until you need those troops. Then you end up putting people on 18-month rotations like they did in OIF I. Better to cut funds from research projects. Do we really need another fighter jet engine? Do we really need another base in the middle of nowhere?
To me, it’s kind of like if you’re wealth. Are you required to give to charity? No. Would anyone think worse of you if you didn’t? Probably not. Despite that, should you donate to a worthy charity? I think there’s a decent moral argument to say you should. The US is wealthy, rich beyond imagination compared to much of the rest of the world. I think there is a moral argument to be made that we should aid countries in need.
In many parts of the world, ‘donating’ the US military will do far more good than if we just gave them some money. Many countries need a strong military to enforce peace, and if given money are likely to not spend it on that. It’s a lot like the reason giving a street bum food is often better than giving him $5.
All of which, of course, is based on the Pax part of Pax Americana being established. Which I acknowledge can be a faulty premise at times.
Off the top of my head, the US has treaty obligations or similar agreements to protect NATO (which is half of Europe right there), South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Taiwan. In addition, Australia and Canada are tightly integrated with the US military on the premise that we would be involved in defending them, although I don’t know if we’re bound by treaty to do so. Realistically, the parts of the EU that are not in NATO would be covered, if nothing else because the parts of EU in NATO would get involved then we’d get involved through that. It’s also pretty hard to picture Mexico facing an invasion without US assistance.
So we actually do have a lot of nations that rely on the US for defense, or at least for assistance with defense.
Now realistically, lets toss out Afghanistan and Iraq because those are special and most likely temporary cases. Which leaves most of Europe (excluding many former soviet satellite countries), South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, and Mexico. Of those, South Korea is the only one under a serious threat of invasion if the US withdrew, and Taiwan is a perhaps. The others are unlikely to be attacked even if the US wasn’t backing them. So when Marley23 says ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s anybody at all’ that would be endangered by a massive military cut, he might be correct.
Considering how enthusiastic America is about attacking other nations, I can’t see a weaker American military as anything other than a net humanitarian gain. If I could I’d slash the military by a factor of ten or so, turn it into a purely defense force.
If that’s the case, and the world needs exactly as much military spending as is currently being spent, perhaps we need to stop subsidizing their defense and force them to pay for it themselves. I don’t see why they should be able to sponge off of us. Perhaps Europe needs to spend less on social welfare and more on the military, and the U.S needs to spend less on the military and more on social welfare.
It is high time that we stopped being world policeman. We cannot afford it, and yet, our military leadership has big plans…to get involved EVERYWHERE!
They are scouting out new roles for us in Yemen, Dharfur, Sudan…etc.
You would think we would have learned from Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan…
Nope, keep the commitments coming!
The adventurism will end when the Chinese stop buying treasury notes.
We don’t need to spend nearly as much as we do on hardware. I agree with Chessic Sense, though, that cutting the number of armed forces personnel is just asking for trouble.
NATO doesn’t need our protection. Germany, France and the UK can field combined forces more than able to fight off any conceivable direct threat.
Part of the reason for having such a substantial military budget is the heft R&D costs associated with coming up, testing and perfecting brand-new platforms (often from scratch) that no one in the world has come up with yet. In many ways you are acting as a substantial subsidy for competing militaries. Price of being on top, I suppose.
China just ‘leaked’ some images of their apparent stealth fighter that looks suspiciously a lot like the F-35. I’m sure they didn’t come up with that tech all by themselves.
It doesn’t look anything like the F-35, except in the sense that any aircraft designed for low radar cross section look alike.
It does look an awful lot like the F-23, Northrop’s entry in the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest that spawned the F-22.
That doesn’t mean it’s based on stolen technology. Trapezoidal wings offer a very good combination of light weight, strength and low drag that becomes critical when you’re designing an aircraft for stealth (meaning lots of aerodynamic compromises in other areas).
The Sukhoi T-50 also uses a slightly trapezoidal wing and V-tail, and nobody has suggested it’s based on stolen technology.
Now, if the Chinese build a working stealth aircraft in the next 10 years, which they say they will, It will almost certainly be based on stolen tech. But they won’t.
ETA: Some people seem to have been confused by a CNN report which showed pictures of the J-20 next to an F-35. But they really don’t look at all alike.
NATO currently constitutes almost 70% of the world’s military spending distributed among its’ member states. The US contributes 43% of that 70%. By those figures then, even if the US halved it’s military expenditure, the NATO states would still command over 50% of the world’s armed capability. (Since the pool gets smaller, the percentage increases.) And that’s not even counting the fact that 3/8 of the nuclear weapons countries are members. (Effectively more since countries may have nuclear bases in other countries.)
So I think the US could safely spend less on the military and more on social welfare, even without increased military expenditure on the European side.
It should be noted that there’s a sharp dividing line somewhere between the ability to project power globally and the ability to project power regionally. It’s not as simple as having some aircraft carriers. You need landing craft and amphibious troops and equipment and choppers and transport aircraft to go with them, unless you just want to bomb Libyan intelligence or something.