I feel like this is patently deceptive. The DoD’s allocation includes the US’s only socialized medical system and universal income for hundreds of thousands.
The biggest difference in spending between the US and countries like China, Russia, and India is not that we have X times as much or better weapons, it’s that our soldiers and defense contractors are paid US salaries in US dollars.
Also, they’re pulling their numbers from congressional allocations, which include massive amounts of medical and retirement benefits investments. Let’s include all medical and social Benicia for anyone whose served from those other nations and look at the numbers.
Who knows, maybe they don’t change much because those countries don’t even try to take care of their service members? I honestly don’t know because the only numbers are always this skewed metric.
A great chunk of this money should be spent on healthcare, education and infrastructure. Instead, politicians have successfully managed to deceive common taxpayer for decades.
Plenty of successful nations spend a lot on their military, it’s just important to recoup the investment by invading other countries for resources when they get bored so they’re too busy to launch a coup
Of course, spending doesn’t actually directly translate into being able to make decent weapons. Since US relies on a privately owned military industrial complex it runs into the problem of perverse incentives. Companies want to siphon as much public money as they can from the government, and that means making expensive weapons that take a long time to produce and have high maintenance costs. This ensures you have low input costs because you’re not producing much, and that you’re able to keep sucking money out of the system for the few items you do produce. To put this into perspective, it costs ten times as much to produce an artillery shell in US than in Russia, and US is still unable to ramp up its production after a year and a half of war to match Russia.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is famous for its corruption having failed audits for 6 years in a row and is unable to account for $3.8 trillion in military assets.
All of this results in an incredibly expensive and inefficient system that isn’t actually able to produce basic things like artillery shells in large quantities. US military industrial complex is good at doing what it was designed to do, which is to divert taxes from things they’re meant for such as social services and infrastructure into the pockets of the oligarchs who own the war industry.
Yes, the US is bad, we can all agree on that. It is not a forgivable thing in a democratic country to have such an out of control oligarchy.
That said, why would the US or NATO want to ramp up production?
Look at how Russia in 2010. A major player as it had insane weapon stockpiles, nuclear capabilities and weakened but still strong alliances in Eastern Europe in Ukraine and Belarus. It had the EU by the balls through gas shipments. NATO was an irrelevant relic.
How does it look like now? It lost Ukraine as an ally, Belarus is not being helpful either. It is spending a significant portion of its weapon stockpiles on destroying a country that was one of its closest allies, while making money for the US. Every house destroyed is a contract for Blackrock, every fighter shot down is a new sale for Lockheed.
The war in Ukraine is grinding down Russia from being a major power, while the US is making bank off of it. It’s just going “Aw shucks we aren’t able to supply enough munitions to kick out Russia and stop this racket, guess you’ll need to knock out a few thousand more tanks!”
What I’m saying is that neither US nor EU are capable of ramping up production. Despite all the talk over the past year and a half, no serious ramp up in production has been seen. Meanwhile, Europe is now going into a recession and spending increasingly more money on the military is going to require more austerity which will in turn keep driving civil unrest.
Also, not sure what universe you live in where Russia is being ground down from a major power buddy. Russian economy is currently booming even according to western sources, Russian industrial production is at six year high, and Russian global trade is as big as it’s ever been. If you think Russia came out of this worse than the west then you really need to stop guzzling propaganda.
It’s still not enough! Until every red-blooded American has a big red button in their home that launches 10.000 nukes at random coordinates, it won’t be enough!
Add comment