Our military spending is equal to the rest of the entire world's combined. Do we believe the ENTIRE WORLD is going to unite against us?
Our offical budgets may equal or exceed the rest of the world, but many countries spend more money on the military outside the budget (as a percentage of spending, mostly or totally not in absolute terms) than the US. China is a very good example of this, the majority of its spending is probably outside its defense budget.
Also the real issue is not how many dollars, yen, marks, yaun/renminbi, etc. are spent but how many resources are used up. If an authoritarian government grabs resources without paying for them, or if you draft people and pay them next to nothing, the official budget cost will be far less than the actual cost.
The exact actual amount of resources devoted to the military for the different countries around the world are pretty hard to determine but its pretty clear the US doesn't devote as much or more than the rest of the world (even if it does devote far more than any other country or group of allied or potentially allied possible enemy countries). So even if you drop the "we spend more than the rest of the world" argument, you still have the "why do we have to spend a lot more than any other country or potential coalition of enemies"?
One answer to that is that we expend more money, preparing for and during wars in order to expend less lives, and also to deter the enemies. Another is deterrence. If your only modestly more powerful than an enemy they may think of challenging you. If your overwhelmingly more powerful deterrence is a lot stronger. Another reason is simply because we have the means to do so, defense has been on a long term decline as a portion of our economy, from nearly 40% down to under 5%, and that decline is likely to continue as is the decline as a percentage of the federal budget (from over 80% to under 20%). Its still expensive, but its becoming less and less so compared to our ability to cover the expense, and it isn't a major long term problem going forward.
None of which implies that we don't spend too much (or that we do), only that we don't spend crazy, ridiculous, unsustainable amounts on defense.
I think we could actually "defend America" with about a tenth of what we have now.
We could defend the US against any possible invasion, and perhaps also maintain our nuclear deterrent. We would not be able to develop and deploy actual defenses against nuclear missiles (at least not without dropping the first two things), or protect free navigation of the seas, or support our allies and trading partners and deter attacks against them, or sort out the situation in Afghanistan, or maintain our technological advantage over our potential enemies.
We could do all those things with less than we spend now (but not with a tenth), we just wouldn't do them quite as well, and the next time a war happens more Americans would die. |
