Just to add emphasis on how much we could cut from the military:
The US is ranked #1 globally in military spending, and we spend more than all of the countries ranked #2-#8 (China, Russia, Germany, India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine) COMBINED.
Which means we either have way more shit than we need to protect ourselves, or, we’re being incredibly wasteful and need to reassess that spending.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I was expecting someone to put the numbers down. Thank you. I can never retain that part.
My personal take, as a non military expert, is that the US has too many branches, with conflicting interests, and not enough coordination and joint command, geared towards force projection and occupation, instead of a highly coordinated, intertwined, cohesive military set for threat deterrence and strategic defense operations.
In my understanding, that was the goal of NATO: having a very large number of countries combined to pool resources, know-how, means of production and, in a dire event, human resources. No country was supposed to drain it’s coffers to be capable to hold off threats.
someguy3@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
NATO was because in WW2 Hitler picked off one country at a time. Everyone together is much better.
And then logistically everyone had different bullets etc so they wanted everyone on the same standards.
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 1 day ago
I think a huge chunk of the US budget goes to the pay, pension, healthcare for the military personnel. I guess that’s a downside of having a huge military that is not conscripted, one that you have to actually pay. Also they have to pay them well and offer stuff like healthcare, pensions etc, to lure in people.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I have no doubt on that and that is agood thing. Those people put their lives up and risk death and injury; they deserve being taken care of.
But how much in comparison goes to funding projects that never return any results or gets diverted towards other less legitimate ends? Just the list of failed weapon systems R&D with monumental unjustifiable expenditure is huge. Plus the investment in overcomplicated weaponry with tens or hundreds of millions of cost per unit, that are found lacking when put to test by the people that will be using it routinely.
And having a volunteer army is a plus. Conscription is not something good to have. The european countries considering it are gettiing serious backlash. People want peace, not have their family die in futile wars brought about by hubris of incompetent politians.
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 1 day ago
Failed weapon system R&D costs are kind of one time thing. With military pensions and health care costs the US is paying like 700 billion $ every year. I’m not saying they shouldn’t pay that, I’m saying perhaps they should downsize a tiny bit. Maybe stop getting into wars all the time.
The thing is, for a country that attacks others, like the US, volunteer army is of course the way to go. You couldn’t do what the US is doing with a conscription army. For countries that have a military for defensive purposes, like the Finnish Defense Forces, conscription is a good thing (and for Finland, you can check the support for conscription, the majority support it and are happy to keep it).
The countries that are getting backlash from bringing conscription back are places like Germany, where people are a bit weird about that, for understandable reasons, sort of. But it does seem like they think that they might slip back into nazism at any point if they are careful, which is a bit weird if you ask me.
Anyway, Germany is not bringing conscription back because they want to go abroad and fight futile wars, they are planning on doing that because the security situation in Europe has changed, thanks mainly to russia attacking Ukraine and doing annoying hybrid warfare stuff, and also a bit because the US is being unstable, unpredictable and unreliable ally.