In the absence of any likely major superpower conflict in the near future, why does the US still maintain high levels of military spending? I can understand it more recently due to the Iraqi War, but why didn’t spending plummet following the end of the cold war? According to the CBO
My question is why did it grow at all during that period up to 2001? Shouldn’t military spending actually had fallen since there were no longer any prospect for WWIII occuring anytime soon? Couldn’t the military been downsized?
I think I am woefully ignorant of the politics behind these things and would really like to understand why all those resources continued to be put in to the military.
This chart shows that defense spending measured as a percentage of GDP started to rapidly fall in the early 1990’s, from a high of 6.2 percent during the Reagan buildup down to a low of about 3 percent.
Current defense spending, even with a war on, is right at 3.5 percent of GDP.
Thanks all. I was trying to find a chart like you posted Mr. Moto and statistics like you cited Lostgoals. I had no idea that military spending was that low. 3% of GPD in 1999, down from 6.2% in 1986. I suppose then that the CBO budget cite I was looking at was in actual dollars and didn’t take into account inflation.
Suppose this turned out to be more a GQ than and GD
I don’t think inflation has much to do with it, as charts like that are good about using constant dollars, usually.
I think comparisons are better made using GDP as a benchmark, though. The question really is how much of a commitment are you making to the military, and the GDP measurement shows this.
If the country or the economy grows, other numbers change. This one won’t. What will change it is a shift in the military mission and its global role, similar to the downsizing after the Cold War.
It depends what you’re trying to evaluate. if you’re trying to compare US military expendatures vs. the rest of the world, obviously you need to aggregate the dollar value of all military spending.
If you’re asking if we spend too much of our national wealth on defense, then raw numbers are misleading. Even with military spending being approximately half a trillion dollars this year, that’s a hell of a lot of money – but it is, as stated before, less than four percent of our economy.
Comparing GDP also allows comparisons between countries, such as between Japan (defense is 1% of the economy) vs. North Korea (probably in excess of 40%), but Japan’s armed forces are much more modern (albiet in a different strategic orientation).
The US is the largest economy in the world if every nation paid X percent of GNP into defense the American military would still be the biggest. That being said, the real answer to your question is Pearl Harbor.
Since 1941 they myth has frown that we were unprepared. As a result, the American people are willing to pay a premium to ensure we are never caught napping again.
Actually I think it is more than Pearl Harbor…and I disagree its a myth. Look at every conflict in this century. In every conflict up to Vietnam the US military starts out unprepared, underfunded, poorly trained and poorly equiped fighting force (though in Vietnam’s case it wasn’t really all THAT bad…those other conflicts though our military started out as a joke for the most part). In each we gained valuable experience…at the cost of our boys blood. At the end of each conflict we had a hardened veteran force that was better trained and equiped than the force we started the conflict with. And the first thing we did in each of those conflicts when it was done was…gut it. We would slash our military spending budget to the bone, mothball or scrap our weapons, etc. I think eventually the citizens of the US got sick of conscription armies made up of their boys being sent out to fight wars while poorly trained and equiped for the tasks being asked of them.
So…we wanted a new model. A full time professional military equiped with state of the art equipment and well trained. That costs money…money that the US population seems willing to spend on maintaining a credible force that is capable of doing whatever we may need it to do. The US being a global power, our military needs to be able to project force on a global scale.
I think its a combination of inertia and trying to dominant in way too many theatres and technologies.
Inertia in the Military Industrial Complex ™. Weapons procurement and politics are way to close and stopping the spending would certainly hurt politicians and some companies. So even if GDP is falling the spending certainly isn’t. Its a lot of pork barrel, flush funds and dollars that aren’t easily held back.
Trying to be dominant in way to many theatres means the US should be able to handle China vs Taiwan (naval/aerial) as well as defending Saudis from Iraq (at the time) (conventional/armored armies). While defending against Terrorists, Hackers, subs and all sort of newly imagined threats. That takes a lot of money while still maintaining professional military personel fit and not bored.
I think the political factor is way more responsible for the still too big spending… I think the US could afford cutting back and helping their economy a bit more. Compensating with alliances. (Before Bush naturally… hehe)
One reason we spend as much as we do is because we are one of the few military powers with true force projection capabilities, and these capabilities don’t come cheap. Think aircraft carriers (real ones, not VSTOL ones), large-scale military airlift capability, serious sealift capability as examples of what I’m talking about.
Plus, if you’re conscripting your soldiers, you don’t have to pay them squat. Or… if you’re in a relatively impoverished country, your soldiers’ wages aren’t high. The US military, on the other hand, has to compete with the private sector, to a certain extent, especially as far as officers are concerned. This costs money.
There’s also a certain amount of institutional knowledge bound up in the production of certain military hardware. Submarines, for example, require very skilled and specialized equipment and workers to produce right. If we quit producing submarines, we’d lose the institutional knowledge to produce them correctly and relatively cheaply. Think of it this way… how tough would it be for the US or any other country to produce a old-style battleship? Tougher than it was in WWII- I doubt we have gun foundries capable of making 16" guns, and we’d have to re-invent them, and many of the processes to make the guns. Same goes for the armor.
Finally, much of the US population and politicians subscribe to Mao’s “Power grous out of the barrel of a gun” concept. The belief is that there are countries out there who just don’t listen to diplomacy and reason, and the only way to compel them to do or not do whatever it is, is through military action. This attitude almost requires that the country have a sufficient military to ensure that we have this capability.