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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (265228)	12/19/2005 11:30:44 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573694

"The military-industrial-government complex" And who was the first to warn us about this? Eisenhower almost 50 years ago, who is often described at the first political general. And, by the way, a Texan. While I agree with your premise, let me add a couple of complicating factors. For one, most countries are willing to accept a higher rate of causulties and a lower rate of training than we are. These two are interconnected. If we accept that a certain causulty rate is acceptable, then we accept that the burden falls on the lower classes or the most desperate. Our military will always be more expensive than any other on a per man basis because we tend to value each individual more. But does that excuse our expenses? No, it does not. A large percentage of the money we spend is to fight a foe that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. We need two militaries right now. One that is highly trained and equiped to take out initial threats, and ones at a lower level who hold territory. Both will need state of the art defensive equipment, but they don't need the same degree of offensive capability.

To: bentway who wrote (265228)	12/20/2005 2:31:07 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573694

I like to point out that OUR 5% of the world's population spends what the other 95% spends on ALL their militaries. It clearly highlights how distorted our spending is since the end of the Cold War. The military-industrial-government complex has just kept on drumming in the fear, confusion and doubt to a public that doesn't seem to have a clue. I imagine most of them probably would guess we spend twice what China does, but maybe one in a thousand would guess we spend ten times what China does on the military. So the US spends 10x what China does on the military. That sounds impressive, but when you take in the higher labor costs and facilities cost in the US it probably significantly lowers the value for spending ratio. I don't know what % of military budget is salaries, but I would imagine that US servicemen get paid somewhere between 10x and 20x what Chinese servicemen get paid. There is probably a similar (if not greater) expense differential for the cost of maintaining facilities - the US bases in Japan probably cost 10x to 40x the equivalent sized military bases in China. A more relevant statistic than expense would be the size of the military.