this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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unless conflicts end worldwide I want my country to maintain the highest level of military technology and local capacity to ramp up if needed. That being said I don't want my country involved with every conflict in the world.
If the USA wouldn't be randomly invading countries every few years, they could keep the same level of military technology while spending much less.
The Iraq war did nothing to increase the US military's capabilities but just wasted enourmous amounts of money while killing civilians on a daily basis.
Yeah but it also gave us the Saddam Hussein outline meme.
Trillions well spent.
NCD user spotted
that's not how technology works, stuff will get outdated if we use it or not
for sure. To boot that was done while backgrounding afganistan which was the main 9/11 thing and caused it to go on forever since it was neglected.
What's up with Americans never mentioning Afghanistan anymore like it wasn't the first place that got invaded after 9/11???
it is much mentioned a bunch by our right on how bad the left president did finally extricating ourselves from the thing they started (and of course lets not forget what president actually eliminated osama)
Good news, they could reduce it by 400 billion a year and still spend more than the the other 3 biggest spenders combined
As a Finn I don't want the US to stop fully... but they have a huge amount of excess, it's insane how much money they waste
Understandable
If it's at the expense of everything else that could help the state of the country and quality of life, what's the point?
if it was but those other things are happening. I think your saying its not enough but when is it enough?
Sorry I was admittedly kinda vague. No point in having the world's best military when it's protecting a country that has destroyed the middle class, expanded the poverty class, secured inadequate funding for social security, failed to give its children a quality education in primary school, and priced secondary education into the stratosphere despite decades of telling kids college is the only thing that will get them a better job than flipping burgers.
Are all those things literally true? No, but some of them are, and they are all headed that way. Would be great if somehow a good military wasn't the only thing anyone was willing to fund.
Oh I get you. I often wonder at what point enough will be enough as we roll downhill.
I'm pretty sure the U.S. can do that without an $816.7 billion defense budget, much of which goes to giant corporations, and without being larger than the next 20 militaries combined.
How about we do a $400 billion defense budget and only be larger than the next 10?
The biggest expenses, by far, are personnel costs and maintenance. The idea that the defense budget is a giant gift to contractors is just not backed up by evidence.
oh yeah but that is still money to defense companies. What you said here is pretty much what I meant. Just enough to maintain top tech levels and ability to ramp up and thats it.
Watching Ukraine absolutely stonewall Russia using cold era tech has been incredible. Imagine what modern equipment could do. I can't wait to see what happens when they get f-16s, which were developed in the mid 70s by the way.
There is N-word that will burn some asses: nationalize.
The last time US was involved in a war that even remotely had something to do with US was WWII. Before that it was probably civil war.