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.
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.
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Hello from Portugal!
We’ve had our little forays into bringing back conscription a few years back and the sentiment was not great. Bad, to be sincere. Conscripts are viewed as essentially cannon fodder; very bad pay, poor conditions and because they have to be there, they can be abused at will. The numbers of conscious objections sky rocketed until it was replaced with voluntary service. And we want volunteer, professional, military personel. Better to have one volunteer than ten unwilling, roughly translated, is a common saying.
Back to the US.
Their weapons programs run for years and several dozens at the same time, across the four branches. It is a lot of money being spent, on a yearly basis.
You are, of course, correct that they should stop getting themselves into wars and instead keep themselves busy with internal affairs. But regardless all of the expenditure with health care and pensions, I remember reading somewhere that a great majority of the homeless population are military veterans, many of which struggle with mental conditions. Doesn’t seem they are spending what they should, how they should. We can also risk a fair degree of corruption, with some confidence.
Meanwhile, in Europe, conscription is not the way forward. Volunteer forces, well trained, well equiped, ready and capable for the kind of modern warfare the Ukrained x Russia is producing is the future. We won’t be seeing trench or open field combat as it was in the past. We’ll have operators controlling remote weapons systems for far away.
someguy3@lemmy.world 18 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.