The US spends more on defense spending than all the other countries in the world combined and yet they're "never prepared" for the "new era" of warfare. Gonna need more money for the defense contractors to research the issue.
This has been the state of affairs since WWII. Now the world is starting to realize that the US has been sustaining this spending level to the detriment of their health and education, and that lack of education has created a group of bozos poised to take over the government and control those armaments.
It's just sucked up by health insurance companies.
Spending less on war won't fix healthcare. Spending less on war and more on healthcare will just make healthcare worse because it will give the private equity vampires running the system more cash with which to bribe politicians and screw us over even more.
Fixing healthcare means spending less.
Spending less on healthcare means we get to spend more on war.
If the US would just get off its ass and implement single-payer we could save so much money that we could have a military capable of killing God.
Same goes for K-12 education spending. The US is consistently in the top 4-5 nations as a percentage of GDP per capita. The money is being wasted. On what, I don't know, I haven't looked into it.
But I do know that the US could halve what it spends on healthcare and "only" be spending what everyone else is spending.
That would save like $2.25 trillion per year.
$2.25 trillion dollars can buy a lot of B-21 bombers.
I don't know if the US could halve their spending on healthcare, but I do believe they could reduce overall healthcare spending by 25%, and be able to provide healthcare to ALL of their citizens.
Their problem is they have too many citizens who believe they can only climb by pushing others down, and so they need to deny their fellow citizens healthcare so they themselves can believe they're succeeding.
Such a selfish civilization is doomed to collapse. Even AI agrees with me! :)
Of course not, how could we be prepared unless we continuously invest? In what other sphere does life continue to flourish in the face of evolving threats without continuous co-evolution?
As an American I am not an at all concerned about the total amount spent. I am highly concerned that it gets spent effectively.
> to the detriment of their health and education
The US is starting to realize that Europe has neglected its own defense in favor of social projects, while relying on US taxpayer defense spending.
> The US is starting to realize that Europe has neglected its own defense in favor of social projects, while relying on US taxpayer defense spending.
It's not that simple. Our social programs matter more to our citizens. The US wastes a lot of money on feeding its military industrial complex, including waging totally unnecessary and inconsequential wars like the second Iraq war or Afghanistan. As soon as they pull out after wasting trillions, things are back the way they were. And in the case of Iraq a lot worse (ISIS). The money for those wars would have been better spent on health and education, and less lives would be lost as well.
What is most important for our safety against countries like Russia is the nuclear umbrella. And the US doesn't want to see more than France and Britain have nuclear capabilities.
Partially correct. Given the US taxpayer funding Europe's defense, the European public wants social programs rather than spending their own gold on their own defense.
Europe's security needs are being met, so they don't want to spend incremental funds on more security.
>And the US doesn't want to see
Yes, the US gets to make the choices when we're the ones paying for Europe's defense. If Europe (as a whole or individually) could match or exceed the US's military might, then Europe would not need the US's permission to make a nuclear umbrella.
>The US wastes a lot of money on feeding its military industrial complex
100% agree. We waste a simply breathtaking amount of money. But again, I am less concerned about the total spend and more concerned with the effectiveness of the spend. I agree that we don't always spend effectively.
> Partially correct. Given the US taxpayer funding Europe's defense, the European public wants social programs rather than spending their own gold on their own defense.
> Europe's security needs are being met, so they don't want to spend incremental funds on more security.
It's just that we don't really have a serious security problem. A bit more so now since Russian agression. But military is not about showing muscle, it's about having sufficient to do the job and not more. Having a military is a prerequisite of freedom but not an end goal in itself. In the US it does seem to be like that.
> Yes, the US gets to make the choices when we're the ones paying for Europe's defense. If Europe (as a whole or individually) could match or exceed the US's military might, then Europe would not need the US's permission to make a nuclear umbrella.
This is the thing about the US. It's always about money and war. Not about quality of life.
In Europe we don't care as much about having a powerful military because we're not looking to march all over the world protecting our interests. It just needs to be powerful enough to protect our borders and meet NATO commitments (which it does now).
Don't forget the US offered us to join NATO, partly in an attempt to prevent us from aligning with other geopolitical entities. If we hadn't had that, we would have built more.
This quality of life take is something that can be talked about only in the context of security needs being met. Since WWII Europe's security needs have been met by the US taxpayer. Everything else is built on that (i.e. Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
And yes, I agree that the US does have a geopolitical interest in paying for Europe's defense, but if we didn't, it's likely that Europe would look very different today than it now does. My guess is that it would be a lot more militarized and that there would be less money for QoL programs.
Well, Europe did look very differently for a long time, with the iron curtain and all. And we did spend a lot on the military during the cold war.
I have to say though that the cold war wouldn't have gotten so out of hand in Europe if it weren't for the US. I think the USSR would have happily let us lie because we didn't have any beef with communism (and in fact during the cold war many Western Europe countries were pretty socialist). We do with dictatorships (which the USSR really was), but not in a sense that we'd want to invade them. Like how Belarus is being left alone as well.
It's the US that was afraid of the world turning communist and willing to fight for capitalism. This caused the arms race. Of course it came from both sides but ever continuing escalation was really the wrong move.
This is the problem I have with the US, they often get themselves into wars that aren't really needed. War should be a last resort and most of them have been far from that. The second Iraq war was based on pure lies. The invasion of Afghanistan accomplished nothing (and Bin Laden was even trained by the US in an earlier war against the soviets). Then there's Vietnam (Admittedly started by France), Korea etc. And of course citizens of other countries start hating you if you blow their countries to bits, increasing terrorism threats. The only one I think was justified was the first gulf war as it was a direct result of Hussein invading Kuwait.
For us "defense" doesn't reach beyond our own borders. The only time it does is under NATO commitments or international pressure.
> they don't want to spend incremental funds on more security.
You could argue that at some point the "security" is the main threat against your security. It is like if I had some armed guard at a post outside my front door. The risk of him shooting me, or my drunk kids crawling through the bushes to avoid discovery, by mistake or at will due to some dispute surely out weight him protecting me from a 1/100 000 risk or what ever of lethal home invasion.
You can watch videos of what war looks like in Ukraine today. It is objectively true that war has changed dramatically. There being financial incentives to accounting for this change is a good thing.
It still seems to be about artillery pounding shells at some place a bit away and trucks moving shells to said artillery. Infantry and armor being some statistical cost in shells. Most shells kinda wins eventually.
Drones just made it even more unlikely that enemies see each other before they die of shrapnel wounds, mines, or what ever.
In any case I know people who are very familiar with the situation on the ground in Ukraine and it is simply not true that it's all artillery and shells and that drones are propaganda.
I claim that the videos are propaganda. Not the drones.
Maybe the distance soldiers are of each other, pretending to be killing each other, have increased from 300-500m to, dunno, 1600m?
I don't think mortars were a big thing in the 1WW. Otherwise, the trenches would have be further apart. You know, the main reason to fire at the enemy is to let them know where you are. Just to make sure they know. Otherwise it might get ugly. Artillery is further back and does not care about the deal.
I don't, because I find the premise that the American military industrial complex actually has to justify itself or restrain itself to a "budget" that is anything but political theatre to be comical. If the US really wants something done, it just does it. The concept of needing "money" to "pay for" things is just a formality when you're a superpower and empire controlling the world's reserve currency, and you have black budgets that trillions of dollars just disappear into and you don't even care enough to keep track of it because war machine just go brr.
In Russia-Ukraine war it works simply because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them did, theatre would have been isolated and the other side won't even be able to deploy heavy combat vehicles for inability to deliver fuel and ammunition for them. Drones impact everything but not aircraft, because they fly way higher and faster. Which means, unless U.S. does not have same drones as everyone else (if Ukraine has them, certainly U.S. can, too), their advantage only INCREASES, rather than decreases, because of drone introduction - because drones devaluates everything except air force, and USAF is stronger than all other non-US air forces in the world put together (that is, because USN air arm is a distant second).
> In Russia-Ukraine war it works simply because neither side has a viable air force.
This is wrong. What happened is that the amount of anti-aircraft systems deployed prevents both sides from deploying a viable air force.
No chance any F-16 or Migs can defeat systems like the Patriot or the Russian S500, that converge to targets at Mach 10. The only systems of the US Air Force with any chance of surviving on this type of environment, would be the most sophisticated stealth systems, that would not be deployed for regular operations. The future belongs to drone swarms working in tandem under the control of an AI....Sadly....
Just to add to this point further. Russia has vastly more combat aircraft than Ukraine, but has only been able to achieve local air superiority in a few areas of the contact line. Ukraine, without having anywhere close to the number of anti-air systems of advanced modern armies have denied most of its airspace to the Russian Airforce, and have shot down many aircraft including the A-50.
The key assumption is that stealth would enable the USAF to operate at will within or close to air defence zones, but this has not been tested against a near peer foe.
It's not just stealth. USAF have perfected their SEAD/DEAD operations over decades. Normal non-stealthy aircraft provided with external assets for triangulating air defence radars can do the job easily and probably, without any losses at all.
Any ground-based air defences today are useless and are just a sitting duck against any modern air force. It's just that the Russia doesn't have one. I know it - i passed training as a radar unit commander for Russian radiotechnical troops. We've been trained to understand that our mission us futile and we will never see anything of value on our radars - best we can do is to try to keep them from being destroyed (by employing false emitters, strategically switching off emission when threatened, and frequently moving) and out personnel from getting killed - by explaining them that HARM's shrapnel is small and command trailers have light anti-shrapnel armour and attack comes on a very short notice, so under attack the enlisted will be a lot safer sitting on their assigned places rather than running away.
When you switch on emission, you don't get to see anything today because ECMs do a very good job. But everyone can see you.
That's been 25 years ago but the equipment we've been trained to operate (it was brand new back then), is still the mainstay of the Russian radar troops, such as Nebo-SV. Slightly modernised versions are entering service now but they won't do a radical difference (modernisations are mostly about using fewer components from ex-USSR countries, because they are either politically hostile or producers gone out of business, not about specs improvement, anyway). In those years, Western anti-radar equipment and tactics have vastly improved though, so if it was one-sided then, it's most certainly so now.
That's what i call "not having a viable air force": not able to deal with ground-based SAMs because of not having enough high quality SEAD/DEAD assets or training to use them.
It goes both ways. If Air Superiority now means everything above 500' AGL, then your infantry is droneable. No heavy vehicles or fuel trucks needed.
Seems like the Army and USAF are stuck between a rock and a fog layer. There's now another warlayer and the Key West Agreement doesn't cover it. Perhaps we need a US Drone Force, because the drones the USAF/USN are thinking about are $10M F-35 wingmen.
This is totally correct in that air power determines the domination. Even if air power can't necessarily route entrenched forces it prevents them from movement and can decimate supply lines. Not only do we have the USAF which is massive you leave out the other important thing which is the Navy's ability to deploy air power. A US carrier has more air power than most countries in the world.
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