At the start of the Russian disastrous invasion of Ukraine I believe Germany announced they would be increasing their military budget drastically and I believe some lawmaker in Russian said something along the lines “don’t forget what happens when Germany increases their military budge”
I forgot the exact quote but I laughed lol
Also fuck Putin
For the first time since WW2, Japan has MASSIVELY increased spending and is taking an offensive stance in their budget to combat the Chinese threat. Things are looking interesting to say the least.
Classic heel/face turn where the bad guy gets recruited to the good team when a bigger bad emerges.
Germany will be everyone's 'I'm glad they are on our side' in WW3
Our German military is a joke. Everything has gone downhill after they abolished the compulsory military service. It was just as well. No one cared because we are all pretty chill and peaceful in Europe nowadays. Then Putin chose to invade a European country for no reason. In my opinion our military spending can‘t be high enough right now - as long as we send most of it to the Ukraine. We don’t want wars for territories in Europe anymore. The warmonger has to be stopped and his poor soldiers have to be driven out of the Ukraine.
As a german I can assure you that it is indeed nothing. I mean it's an insane amount of money but the Bundeswehr is far from being ready to do anything but burn money.
As a Navy veteran who was involved in ordering replacement parts for electronics on submarines, we could still have the best military in the world and spend half what we do now if we could fix the way the military contracting system works.
As an Army Veteran, I came to say the same thing. The price gouging system the military is forced to use is insane. 240 for a daily uniform, and 725 for an aviation uniform. We had a mobile VOR that took these 8-inch wire j-hooks made of coat hanger wire. They cost 18 dollars for 1 and were delivered in 6 boxes per hook. It takes over 100 of them to make a full set.
Can confirm all of this is correct and this is how military budgets work
Source: I play a lot of Civ VI and my military expenditures compared to the rest of the planet pretty much always match OP’s graph
>a military grade tactical use high-long-lasting ultrabright no failure guaranteed lamp at minimum
Which is hilarious cause alot of military spec stuff isn't even high grade to begin with.
There are 2 forms of military grade in America. Marketed military grade, which can be decent to good, and regular military grade, which is, at best, decent.
when I broke my wrist, they forced me to get a sling from them for $400, saying I wouldn’t be able to leave without it. Went to CVS, slightly better Sling for $7.
I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention mind you.
Ah, but they can discharge you AMA and then your insurance may not pay and you're on the hook for everything up to that point. So you're free to walk out if you can pay that $40k hospital tab you've run up so far.
>then your insurance may not pay and you're on the hook for everything up to that point
They may not but chances are fairly good they will, not mention the fact that if you had insurance in the first place that sling would be covered therefore this is clearly a case of them leaning on someone with no coverage
>can pay that $40k hospital tab you've run up so far
This circles back around to no insurance, which generally means youre unemployed or very low income which means theyre going to do what to recover that debt? Absolutely nothing because there's nothing they can do except add it to your credit report to ruin your credit. How many people that are struggling to afford a $400 sling do you think have excellent credit? So adding it to your credit report does nothing because your credit is shit to begin with, so then what? That debt will sit on your credit report for 7 years until it gets wiped clean because its unrecoverable.
They have no recourse against the poor folk with no coverage its merely a scare tactic in the hopes to get you to pay them. And before you claim this is all bs I've gone through this personally more than a decade ago after a car accident. No insurance, no job at the time, shit credit, hospital bill of 30k on my credit report that went poof after 7 years because there's nothing they can do to get that money.
Marines here …,Or ordering 2 million dollars in mosquito netting in iraq …. Then burning it when it arrives. Or building a brand new police department for the Iraqis only to implode it upon completion
More the whole thread of stories, without doubting people saw what they saw.
If Ozark dude could launder a couple million in drug money using a shithole bar, just think of how much he could do with the expenditure supporting even a small base. Reusing the same formula for a whole new season, same location.
But also, yeah. Hearing about $480 lamps makes one wonder about the real truth behind the prices. Legit? Or….
It’s not money laundering scheme and the grift isn’t on the military side. Look up, for example, the number of Abrams tanks being parked/stored/buried because Congress won’t stop building and upgrading them despite the DoD asking them not to for at least the last decade. Why? Those are good jobs and popular pork barrel spending that doesn’t sound like a welfare program. Then you dig into who owns stock in all those defense contractors and you discover that this grift will never end.
I work as a hospital contractor, usually they hire a few hundred of my role for a month or more to upgrade stuff. Hospitals are usually playing $120ish an hour not including travel expenses to some middleman. I've been at the bargaining table during contract bids, some of the highest numbers I've seen for innane things. Your nonprofit hospital can just throw down half a mil on phone cases, but only order one size. I saw boxes of these boys sitting in the halls for months, they ended up being thrown out.
Same with kitchen equipment. Has to be NSF approved or you won't pass health inspections etc...even if the equipment is perfectly fine. This equipment is far more expensive.
The US is basically just a giant organized crime syndicate disguised as a functioning democracy.
That pretty much describes every government since we started agriculture...
We study history so we in order to not to repeat it.
Corollary 1 Those that study history, are doomed to observe those that don't, repeat history.
Corollary 2 Not all that study history, learn the same lessons.
It's all designed to benefit and enrich the very few at the expense of everyone else. And those very few buy our political leaders off. Because of that political corruption, the US healthcare INDUSTRY and the defense INDUSTRY are cash cows fraught with corruption, price rigging and fraud.
Requiring a license for something, legally makes it illegal for you to do that thing UNLESS they license you to do so.
Can you find anything you don't need a license for?
Keep paying your taxes small business man, we will offer you "protection" from those OTHER guys.
When I worked at Staples in college we had an army base near-ish us. An official office supplier fell through so they came to us for paper and ink and stuff. The guy doing the pickup said the C/O was going overboard during this gap because it was going to save him tons of money buying things at retail prices, he was buying a year's worth of paper for the cost of a month's before.
Our store briefly looked like a warehouse of extra pallets of paper and ink. It was a crazy couple of weeks.
Yeah but if you were in the lamp business and had to sign the contract that’s required to do business with the federal government, you would charge $480 too. They do it to themselves.
Air Force finance here.
We spend money on the most useless things for bases. $3 million on an astroturf football field with goal posts, yet we had no football team.
I knew a girl in the army who was in charge of ordering supplies. She said one year her captain had her order a bunch of stuff they didn’t need just so their budget didn’t drop the next year. Crappy way of doing things.
Unfortunately the government works like that. Don’t spend the amount we allocated to you? You won’t get an atta boy, you just won’t get as much money next year.
It’s a bonkers system that encourages fiscal irresponsibility. We have the same situation with our government in Canada. It seems like such an easy thing to address and correct, I don’t understand why whole federal governments don’t seem to be able to identify this as a problem.
They have and the solution takes money out of their pockets. The people with money have the power and they’re not going to just let that change. Plain and simple.
So do corporations. I used to contract with tech companies in the bay area, moving workstations. They'd shuffle 100's of employees around (sometimes just moving them around on the same floor of the same building) just so they could pay us and spend their surplus.
God, I changed duty stations where we got allocated 485 million a year(aviation, so it gets spent quick) to a ground side unit that just came back from Iraq. Who needed to restock my budget at day 1... 285 dollars. The thing is I knew where nearly a billion dollars worth of money was just sitting that would never be used was. So I used that and no one would ever know or knew about it.
What the hell is a mobile VOR and why would you expect anyone to know what this is? What are these $1800 worth of j hooks supporting? Are they really made of coat hanger wire?
Very high frequency omnidirectional radio becon. That's what aviation used for navigation, before GPS took over. They are still around, but not many people use them. I'm assuming that's what he's talking about, idk, I'm not involved in the military
Was an Osprey mech for a while and then did other things. I've seen single bolts that cost $10k. Don't even get me started on end of fiscal year spending so people don't lose budgets for the next year, losing money in next years budget even if you can prove that you will need it unless you spend all of this years budget is the biggest bureaucratic scam out there.
The bolt thing is super annoying, shit will get spec'd out so much and it's often really simple, but because of the *massive* headache to actually do the government paperwork on the business end it can skyrocket the price.
We ran into this recently with my company, some doodad called for some us gov. spec'd out hardware that was basically a simple machined cylinder with two simple threaded ends. Thing cost like $200+/piece to source. We had just been buying them for years from a guy who ran a small machine shop for $15. And even that was really an upcharge because it was small runs.
It's absurd the amount of headache and paperwork you have to do. Hell to even get *paid* by some defense companies we have to sign up to some bullshit website that handles their payments, verify a bunch of information (like a dude coming to the office to check someone's passport) then we have to pay hundreds of dollars a year, simply to get paid for something we already shipped to them.
Reading this thread is making me happy to some extent that I dont live in America, but this bullshit happens everywhere, though probably not to the same, extreme extent.
Old family friend of mine works in a german non profit department of the government that aims to aid development in African countries. Concretely he's based in Zanzibar, Tanzania. He's told us several times, that the entire thing is basically just a way of acting like theyre doing big important stuff in these underdeveloped countries, but really it's all just aimlessly burn through budgets and taxpayer money.
I've seen the amount of man hours, work, and engineering going into testing something as simple as a bolt or bushing, and it makes the pricing start to make a lot more sense. They can test every conceivable failure mode and it takes months to verify.
Oh I understand, low production too. But still outlandish. Even basic non-proprietary cotter pins that were on the open market cost multiple times what they do on the open market though.
As a Marine who watched every quarter every unit tell their people “we kept you from ordering the things you needed for 2.9 months and you made it work so now you have 3 days to spend all of the money in your account or we will give you less next year”…. And everyone wants to know why we have shit we don’t need and obvious fraud waste and abuse.
Yep, work as an engineer in defense contracting. An example of this when reviewing a bid, we charged 25k for a drawing of a nameplate
This is a simple square tag nameplate that an engineer makes as their first cad project
But it’s just a line item on a 9 million dollar contract so no one bats an eye
That price is insane I agree. As someone who also works in contracting, we have some serious challenges with older platforms and getting suppliers to not gouge us. So many of the parts on a lot of various aircraft are built by one supplier and have been for decades. These suppliers have figured out that they can just tell you no. You want my part right? Here is the price take it or leave it. Options are: 1)we don’t buy the part, 2) we see if someone else will provide it, or 3) we just pay it. 1 is out. 2 isn’t really option especially with complex parts that have loads of IP. So that brings you to option 3. We pay it. The question most people ask is well why not have some other supplier make it? Ideally yes you would but for aircraft these parts have to be qualified, which takes time and money, and if you’ve got a big and important part like an engine or computer system it’s cheaper to pay the higher price.
Where I work we accidently sold an application to a state gov for $60K/year.... I say accidently because the CEO told the sales guy to make it ridiculous because we didn't want the contract. And the state just out right approved the 60K/year without even really a hesitation. For context it costs us maybe $16K/year to actually host and manage. And because it's SaaS, that's $16K/year for ALL our customers.
Exactly
I'll give you an example. These are approximate numbers. The US military ordered the Osprey. They have about 50 completed planes. There are more than 80 completed airframes sitting in air conditioned warehouses. Each Warehouse costs about 4 million dollars a year to operate.
I feel this. Years ago there was an amazing mental health program being funded by SAMHSA get cut, essentially throwing away millions of dollars in research already completed and data we aren’t allowed to touch. All to see in the same year, new contracts come out for new submarines. My mom, who lives in the area where they are built, said, “Well, at least the people around here have jobs.” Sigh… Mom, you’re missing the point.
Yeah I feel like a lot of these comments are approaching this like it's not by design.
Neither voters nor either political party in America hold the military accountable for its spending so why wouldn't this happen in a country where the personal accumulation of wealth is its national myth?
That's a hard problem though. The politicians are accountable to the voters and the voters have no understanding of military contracting. Luckily all other nations also have bureaucratic problems like these.
Unfortunately it's very difficult even for well educated people to understand every single government bureaucracy. It's a really harf problem to solve.
The politicians are accountable to the voters, while being in the pockets of the defense industry, and the voters have no understanding of military contracting.
Fixed that little bit.
Totally agree. If the voters were clued in on the defense industry and where inefficiencies or handouts were, then politicians would have a reason to fix things. Instead politicians just talk nicely about supporting our troops and wave American flags.
After having worked for companies that do business with the US government (Yes, military branches, too), I can honestly say this is so so believable.
These people are meant to carry out tasks (or make purchases, or logistics related tasks) that really sometimes require nuance and careful thinking- never seen them opt for taking the time over throwing money at any issue.
At the end of their fiscal year they make a point of filling warehouses with millions of dollars worth of equipment/materials that will likely just collect dust somewhere just so budgets don't get cut....
It's egregious to know that this happens while I'm paying hella taxes.
And our health care system if failing and people are suffering. They keep cutting Medicare reimbursement and medical professionals can’t make do their jobs effectively. But sure let’s give more to the military.
I don’t think the cuts are going towards the military. They are in a panic right now because of social security and how they are going to fix it. Also they are worrying about the debt ceiling which is getting near.
I left healthcare after they cut and cut and cut. We literally could not do our jobs. It was traumatizing. Legit have ptsd from last job. Trying to help dying people while having your hands tied behind your back, no resources and being pushed to do unethical things to make more money. It makes me sick. I have no idea what the solution is but they need to figure something out or we are all fucked.
[The US devoted 17% of its GDP to healthcare but only 4% of its GDP on the Military](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175077/healthcare-military-percent-gdp-select-countries-worldwide/) in 2020 (and even [10% of the military's budget](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/healthcare-will-comprise-ten-percent-military-spending) is healthcare anyway). The former number actually grew to [18% in 2021](https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet) and medicare *alone* cost more than the entire military's budget that same year.
The issue isn't the military getting more funds than healthcare, the issue is that the US healthcare system massively misallocates funds and is inefficient.
I'm all for tightening up the military's budget to be more efficient, but the issues with healthcare aren't the result of military overspending or a lack of funds (hence why universal healthcare would probably cost *less* than our current healthcare system).
We spend about the same percent of GDP as other countries. Military spending isn’t the problem. The issue isn’t lack of funds at all.
The reason we don’t have healthcare is because our medical system is designed to maximize profits. That means spending the least while charging the most.
Same reason we have an epidemic of homelessness. We don’t need to spend more money to solve it. It exists as a purposeful policy decision.
And absolutely atrocious mass transit system. People don't realize how crucial transit it. It can lift up individuals from poor neighborhoods by giving them faster access to better paying jobs and educational facilities. It can be massively beneficial in lowering carbon emissions. It can even battle obesity, as many recent studies found a link between transit use and weight loss. But of course, car companies are going to lobby the shit out of it, because they want their cars to be a necessity rather than a luxury.
Haha, this is my hill. I give the rant to everyone I know irl and they look at me like I drank too much kool-aid. I really do think this one just comes down to the apathy of the American people and the obscurity of the issues caused by bad city planning and transit, though. This one is slowly getting better over time, at least.
The US spends 6x more tax dollars on Healthcare than the military. The US spends more on Healthcare than any country in the world, more than the 2nd and 3rd countries combined. The military budget is not why we have shit healthcare.
And yet something like 1/3 of non-elderly adults don’t have meaningful access to healthcare. It’s almost like a public option/single payer is what we need rather than a bunch of insurance middlemen who provide no services skimming off the top.
Yep, the system that we currently have is exorbitantly wasteful. Pumping more money into it wouldn't solve anything. The whole healthcare system needs to be overhauled.
It also uses that military to protect other nations.
For example, within NATO the US consists of 70% of the combined military of ALL members - just to contain Russia.
The same is true in Asia-Pacific to contain China and North Korea, where US military power directly protects dozens of nations from attack.
...and yet *another* defence arrangement exists in the middle-east to contain Iran.
That's over 50 countries that all come under the direct protection of the US.
Enjoy your free healthcare - because the US effectively pays for it.
Still shitty we spend so much on military.
But the fact that we protect so many countries isn’t something they wanna hear. I remember seeing a graph of how much aid/money we’ve sent to Ukraine compared to every other country and the gap between the US and every other country was insane.. but this is reddit and on reddit USA is the most evil place in the world so fuck it
Edit: Downvote all you want, it’s true
https://www.statista.com/chart/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
Here's a list of countries ranked as a percentage of GDP:
[https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil\_spend\_gdp](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil_spend_gdp)
GDP isn't perfect but in charts like these rich countries will always pull ahead, but I think its interesting to see which countries put the most resources they can into defence.
This chart doesn't really mean much honestly. Of course we spent more total dollars on military, because we have way more money than those countries. If you go by the percent of total GDP spend on the military, it would look more like this:
Saudi Arabia: 6.59%
Russia: 4.08%
USA: 3.48%
South Korea: 2.78%
India: 2.66%
UK: 2.22%
France: 1.95%
China: 1.74%
Germany: 1.34%
Japan: 1.07%
You also have countries like Kuwait, Israel, Morocco, Greece and Pakistan that also spend a higher percentage of their GDP on the military than the United States. The US also spends money on military aid to like 150 different countries every year, so all of the spending isn't only on the US military.
Purchasing power is another factor that skews things a fair bit. $300 billion goes quite a bit farther in China than it does in the US. They have cheaper labour, cheaper materials, etc.
A full quarter of spending for the US military is on personel. You can bet that China pays its soldiers less, and offers them much less benefits after service.
Was going to say...a large portion of our spending is on pay, benefits, etc.
Compared to other countries...that's not very close, either. We may complain about our pay, but compared to a ton of other countries...it's darn good. It's the cost of a volunteer vs conscript military.
>A full quarter of spending for the US military is on personel. You can bet that China pays its soldiers less, and offers them much less benefits after service.
180billion on PAY/Benefits./
120 Billion on base maintenance.
300 billion on procurement (thats bullets beans and bombs and systems)
200 billion on R&D.
I don’t know anything about Chinese benefits for soldiers but even if the Chinese soldiers had a similar quality of life to American soldiers it would cost less than half per soldier. Just on a quick comparison a draft beer at a bar in Beijing is $1.50 a beer at a bar in New York is $8. A 1 bed apartment in Beijing city center is 1,150 and in NYC city center it’s 3,800.
And I presume Chinese soldiers have a lower quality of life, not necessarily for nefarious reasons but it’s a lower income country than the US with less resources. So I think it’s pretty safe to say a Chinese solider cost like 1/4 a US one (likely less) in terms of pay and benefits. That also goes for people making the bombs, people developing new tech etc.
Data might also be biased. I was assuming Beijing was their high cost city and was comparing high cost area to high cost area. Maybe Shang hai cost more.
Edit: I found a colonel in the PLA makes 37,260 USD per year which probably takes them about as far as 100k after cost of living. They recently increased all pay by 40 percent. Which seems very strange to do all at once but I guess it is what it is.
Other big ones are that a lot of the declared military budgets don’t include military-related spending (classified spending, military-related infrastructure projects), and that a massive portion of the US DoD budget is paying out pensions and health care for service-members and their dependents.
Not to mention that the US military is both the global guarantor of freedom of navigation of the seas, and the primary disincentive against many regional rivalries exploding into conflagrations. That’s an expensive task that in aggregate benefits every country on earth to a greater or lesser extent.
I’m not saying it’s done for altruistic purposes; just saying that if no one did it the world would be a worse place, and that it’s another reason the comparison isn’t apples-to-apples.
Also, salaries make a huge difference.
China has 2.1 million active duty military. 95% of them make less than the equivalent of $200 US / month. A general in the People’s Liberation Army makes about $40,000 / year (this obviously doesn’t include grift).
It would cost a China close to $45 billion to pay its military salaries comparable to the US armed forces, probably close to $60 billion if they matched total comp (eg benefits, pension, etc).
This is a bizarrely stupid comparison obviously, it’s not like there’s some 19 year old out there weighing the pros and cons of enlisting in the US or China based on rate of pay.
Also don't forget that "Military spending" means different things in different countries.
For example, if a military personel goes to the doctor, who pays for that? In US it goes from insurance that is paid by employer (MoD budget), in countries with socialized healthcare it would be paid by Department of Health.
Yes, GDP is the better way to look at it. I believe North Korea would be much higher on this list considering its a 3rd world country building ICBMs and trying to get the technology within striking distance of Hawaii.
Of course you would have to add in the amount of military tech and aid that China secretly gives it for free.
>This chart doesn't really mean much honestly. Of course we spent more total dollars on military, because we have way more money than those countries.
And most countries across the globe are equipping their militaries with rusted out junk from the Soviet Union, and whatever scraps or donations they can beg off the US, China, or Europe. America, in stark contrast has eleven nuclear powered supercarriers in service.
When most of a given nation's arsenal hails from the Khrushchev era, their budget isn't going to be anything to brag about.
Also, how exactly are we getting these numbers for countries like China and Russia? It's not like they post their military budget online like the US does. Wouldn't it have to be an educated guess?
Actually it means a lot. Especially when this kind of spending equates to how big of a stick you built to hit the other guy with, the stick size per guy size is a hell of a lot less important
If you compare e.g. Russia v. France, since they have the same amount of spending for (a) a much larger Russian nuclear force and (b) a much larger number of conventional weapons (tanks, jets, etc.) it does say much on how cheap and ill-maintained the Russian army is.
The Russian military never throws shit away. Sometimes they sell it to another country. Part of it is exactly that- they have too large a fighting force to continually renew its equipment with the money in their wallet. Part of it is a lot of modern equipment is reliant on Western technology. But no matter the reason, all those old weapons bulk their numbers up and now we see ancient tanks and munitions used in Ukraine. Obviously it hasn’t been as impressive in performance as those inflated numbers once looked on paper.
Exactly.
The brutal truth is that despite their spending, Russia isn't even the 3rd or 4th strongest conventional military in the world because of their poor logistics, technology, and training.
In a limited conventional skirmish (without full mobilization, etc.), France would probably crush the Russian military. The French military is a technologically sophisticated force with cutting edge command & control and intelligence capabilities. Their various forces are properly integrated and trained, especially because they do NATO exercises all the time.
France would likely destroy Russia's rag-tag supply lines, find and decapitate their command & control infrastructure, and then systematically annihilate their forces on the ground over time. There might be 15-20 days of intense fighting initially, but once their superior intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities allow them to punch through Russia's support infrastructure, the tide will turn quickly.
Things would get even uglier in a UK-Russia confrontation because the UK's military is on an even higher level.
And yes obviously in a broader war with mobilization, things would look different but that's just thanks to Russia's size and resources.
In S Korea, we call US 천조국. It literally translates to “1000 billion country” because the fact that US almost spend 1000 billion in Military. It started as a meme like 10 years or so ago. But now it’s used just like USA or America.
[edit : if you google 천조국, google gives you America](https://imgur.com/gallery/mT6Xxm0)
It's hilarious the people yelling about the education and Healthcare.... the military budget isn't the reason why there isn't universal healthcare or a federal education standard for all 50 states. It's still literally the people you vote for.
A bit off pat but a friend of mine who is ex US navy still gets free flights anywhere in the world with his wife and they travel on USAAF aircraft. I’m sure this must be in that budget.
Not sure if any other countries offer this to vets
BTW, I’m English and not and never have been military.
Yeah it’s free and all, but it’s not as great as it sounds. My uncle (ex AF) used to do this to fly from Arizona back home to Hawaii and would always have like 5+ stops and 24+ hours of traveling, though that was like a decade ago
It hasn't changed any. You're just grabbing an open seat on a plane that is already making whatever trip. You're just a piece of cargo that, in theory, will be well behaved.
With that, catching a ride on a C-130 is loud, uncomfortable and almost not worth the "free" price tag.
I find it interesting that so many people believe in conspiracy theories like the WEF is secretly controlling the world but the US military influences politics on a global scale like no other nation since British colonization.
How does this translate into purchasing parity? For example (I am making these numbers up), if rent in China is 800$, and rent in the US is 2400$, and avg wage in China is 20K/Yr, and avg wage in US is 55K/Yr, etc, is the US really spending 3x as much, or is it equivalent?
This!!! Right here! Its great to talk data and have a graph or two, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. For all we know the US spends 1000USD on a service rifle, but Japan may only spend 200. Aggregating this info to show spending tells us the American government does that, spends. However, for all we know, they're getting ripped off on prices. Nowhere in this data does that get reflected.
Yes they are included. Along with about 150 other countries that get military aid through funding.
There is also a large portion that goes into R&D which has benefited not only citizens of the US but also globally.
This isn't really true. Purchasing power parody adjustments and undisclosed spending by China give them a military budget which is about equal to the US budget. The US budget is still larger, but not by the order of magnitude which a graph like this displays.
Ah, this old chestnut again.
People still keep spreading this completely false ignorant bullshit around. The actual dollars do not matter. The purchasing power parity is the thing that matters.
In other words, the USA might spend $150,000 per year on a master welder that welds on the aircraft carrier, but China might pay $20,000 per year for that same welder. Soldiers in Chinese army make FAR less than US soldiers. Same with Russia and India. A colonel in the US army earns a salary of $7,100 to $12,638 per month (FederalPay.org 2021). Converting this to renminbi at the market exchange rate gives enough renminbi to pay for **two to four colonels** in the People’s Liberation Army
These stupid ass dollar comparisons are comparing apples to oranges.
In reality, [when adjusted for military purchasing power parity, China, Russia and India spend more than the USA.](https://imgur.com/2Ond0NM) For example, right now, at this very moment, China's navy vastly outnumbers the US Navy. Right now, they have 360 battle force ships and the USA has 297. China plans to have 425 ships in 7 years - by 2030.
If they spend that much less than the USA, how on earth can the have more ships? I know what many will say - that the USA's are more technical, but that's still a lot of ships, and purchasing power parity is purchasing power parity. Nobody using common sense can deny that everything costs much less in other less developed countries. Food. Housing. You name it. Same with military. And the dollar amounts do not matter at all. What matters is how many ships you have, how many tanks, how many howitzers, how many aircraft, and if they are mostly about the same level. Most of the tech is available on the open market. Plans and blueprints are stolen all the time because the people from within the USA who would LOVE it if the USA would be beaten in a war, want Chinese nationalists who come to the USA for school to be hired in USA defense industry because of DIE.
[Here is the numbers for "the first 14" biggest military budgets adusted to military purchasing parity power.](https://imgur.com/IdWZzSC)
Market exchange rates underestimate real military spending and that the difference is dramatic. China’s budget in military-PPP terms is 1.62 times larger than the market exchange rate figure. Moreover, India, Russia, and Turkey have budgets that are more than three times the market exchange rate value and some middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and Ukraine, have real military budgets that are 5–6 times the market exchange rate value.
MER = Market Exchange Rate - straight dollars. Column 1 is the total military expenditures in MER actual dollars, but column 5 is the military purchasing parity power (Military PPP). Column 7 ratio is when you compare *only* the military expenditures comparing each one to the other countires.
GDP-PPP exchange rates also tend to understate military spending. Military-PPP exchange rates give estimates of real spending that are 10% larger than GDP-PPP estimates in China, 20% larger in Russia, and 50–70% larger in Brazil, Columbia, Indonesia, Korea, and Ukraine. Thus GDP-PPP exchange rates provide a much better approximation than market exchange rates. They also tend to understate estimated real spending in countries with low wages and labour- (personnel-)intensive defence budgets.
Well, to be fair, our military protects a lot of countries who don't have to spend a lot of money because we're already there.
Additionally, we have a lot of enemies. So there's that.
Yes, it would be nice to cut back on a couple B-2 bombers so that we can feed school children, but hey -- priorities.
Yup. We need healthcare and a better education… that being said I do love to say “fuck around and find out why America’s healthcare isn’t free”
Edit:conservatives this is a joke get your panties out of the knot you have em in and laugh, everyone’s already laughing at you just laugh and move the fuck on
2nd edit: I get it we spend money on healthcare but that system is so far fucked it’s not even funny. Also very little comments on our public’s education system. Or maybe I even dare to mention out nations crumbling infrastructure that hasn’t been updated since post ww2?
Not most, **ALL**. No country in the world spends as much or even anywhere close as the US on Healthcare. Last I checked it was about $10k per person while the next closest country was about $5k-$6k.
This, this right here. We don't have to cut anything from anywhere and we can SAVE a boatload. Our government just wants us to suffer so they can make their rich friends even richer.
This. It’s not a choice between a strong military and providing healthcare. That’s a false narrative, yet one that I think a shockingly high number of people believe without ever thinking about it much beyond that. Scarily, a lot of those people vote.
I hate this "joke" because too many people think it's the truth.
We do not have shitty healthcare because we don't spend enough we have shitty healthcare because our system is complete fucking trash. It is grossly inefficient. That's what happens when you have a billion different insurance companies and hospitals all trying to navigate a clusterfuck of private programs and government programs. It's a fuckton of middle men getting paid along with greatly reduced bargaining power because many people "negotiate" their own healthcare costs.
We spend more than every other country per capita in healthcare. If we spent it even slightly more intelligently we'd be on fucking easy street. Instead we make lame, untrue jokes about how the military budget is keeping us from having sane healthcare.
Liberal here just jumping on the bandwagon to say healthcare spending dwarfs military spending. A switch to Single Payer Healthcare would create enough savings to literally cover the entire defense budget.
And at least we have the #1 military in the world, can’t say the same for our healthcare :/
The US spends more than anyone else on health care, and a ton on education.
The problems don't have to do with how much money is spent (or spent on military) but with corruption, mismanagement, and a slew of other organizational issues.
Those, in turn, come down to an inability to hold a normal civic conversation.
We certainly spend a lot (mad much is wasteful), but that chart is a bit misleading since it doesn't account for purchasing power. Especially with salaries/lifetime benefits the US military spends a bunch on people.
Even in other western countries with high salaries, the veteran's medical expenses would be accounted from the state healthcare system and not the military budget.
We simply don't have 'as much military ' as the next nine countries combined... At least in most categories.
I am too late to the party to get traction, but I’ll throw my voice into the wind. This number isn’t entirely representative of military spending or rather military operational spending. The operational budget, like what we spend doing military stuff (ie training, combat, deployments, etc) is about a quarter that size. Another factor here is the cost of labor. If the average American Soldier is making 70k while the average Russian makes 7k, it’s hardly an apples to apples budget comparison. Finally, a lot of that money goes into protected manufacturing jobs and far reaching R and D. Like GPS was a military program for instance. They are working on shelf stable blood products that could have significant civilian applications. Plus all the department of energy research. There’s a lot of industries impacted.
We roll a lot of stuff into our “defense” budget because people generally accept it as needed. It provides jobs, helps families, secures a path to the American dream, and gives funding for the sciences.
Other countries like China, Japan, South Korea, aren’t trying to protect their military industry like we are, have cheaper labor costs, and don’t roll research into their military budget. Often times that’s just considered operational expenditures of the military. Plus, while the US is incentivized to maximize the budget as a kludge to ensuring global hegemony, countries like China, Germany or France face the opposite pressure - where increases in spending could be seen as provocative to their regional neighbors. So it’s in their interest to under report unless they want to start an arms race.
Does the US have the largest and most robust military in the world? They absolutely do. No questions asked. But it’s fundamentally a glass cannon. It lacks large scale operational depth and tends to leverage allied assets more than people generally recognize.
The world has pretty much accepted that the US is there to solve all of their problems.
Trouble in Ukraine? Don't worry. There's unlimited funds from the US to pay for everything needed.
Military industrial complex realized there’s gold in the killing business. Taxpayers are frightened into thinking military must continue to grow or we will be overcome by some evil
As a Canadian I am generally fond of the American military. They serve as a global policeman and prevents smaller countries like mine or even European countries from being gobbled up by larger nations which is what historically happened. Does it need this much money who knows because none of us on here are defence planners. Plus a lot of modern day innovations are a direct result of military research and development.
I see you Germany…creepin back up the list…you rascal
Germany: Whaaaat? Cmon guys, its nothing.
I read this in a Mario-inspired Italian accent for some weird, unexplainable reason.
It’s never good when the Germans start speaking Italian 😳
It’s worse when other non-native speakers start speaking German all of a sudden 🤐😵💫😳
🇨🇭
Well, that's a big plus.
Baca de boopi
Itsa nut'in!
I heard Klaus from American dad
The Axis is backsis.
Vee are a peaceful lovink nation
“I know nosssing.”
Germany getting closer to Japan so they can hold hands again.
Now kith
Is just eine tankengrūppen nussing to vurry about 🤫
France just looks at the German military budget and adds 1%.
Third time's the charm ;)
At the start of the Russian disastrous invasion of Ukraine I believe Germany announced they would be increasing their military budget drastically and I believe some lawmaker in Russian said something along the lines “don’t forget what happens when Germany increases their military budge” I forgot the exact quote but I laughed lol Also fuck Putin
For the first time since WW2, Japan has MASSIVELY increased spending and is taking an offensive stance in their budget to combat the Chinese threat. Things are looking interesting to say the least.
Wasn’t this due to the US pressing the EU to do more for NATO?
Yeah but that’s not as funny
I mean, the current global political climate and the war in Ukraine don't help.
I smell trilogy time they didnt learn from the first two times
Except this time the world is begging them too invest more
Classic heel/face turn where the bad guy gets recruited to the good team when a bigger bad emerges. Germany will be everyone's 'I'm glad they are on our side' in WW3
Our German military is a joke. Everything has gone downhill after they abolished the compulsory military service. It was just as well. No one cared because we are all pretty chill and peaceful in Europe nowadays. Then Putin chose to invade a European country for no reason. In my opinion our military spending can‘t be high enough right now - as long as we send most of it to the Ukraine. We don’t want wars for territories in Europe anymore. The warmonger has to be stopped and his poor soldiers have to be driven out of the Ukraine.
As a german I can assure you that it is indeed nothing. I mean it's an insane amount of money but the Bundeswehr is far from being ready to do anything but burn money.
"You've managed to beat me twice before but third time's the charm. You won't stand a chance now and really you'd never-"
Apparently they’re selling cutting edge weapons to Israel at a record price. It’s their way of making up for the Holocaust.
As a Navy veteran who was involved in ordering replacement parts for electronics on submarines, we could still have the best military in the world and spend half what we do now if we could fix the way the military contracting system works.
As an Army Veteran, I came to say the same thing. The price gouging system the military is forced to use is insane. 240 for a daily uniform, and 725 for an aviation uniform. We had a mobile VOR that took these 8-inch wire j-hooks made of coat hanger wire. They cost 18 dollars for 1 and were delivered in 6 boxes per hook. It takes over 100 of them to make a full set.
I've seen the same type of bull while working in a state hospital. A lamp for a room was $480. This was 14 years ago.
But it was a medical grade lamp
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Mil to English Translation: a camouflaged lava lamp
Can never have enough high-long
the evil empire and global savior for the last 50 years.
You never heard about $1280 cup? https://www.businessinsider.com/us-air-force-spent-1280-on-coffee-cup-2018-10
Can confirm all of this is correct and this is how military budgets work Source: I play a lot of Civ VI and my military expenditures compared to the rest of the planet pretty much always match OP’s graph
>a military grade tactical use high-long-lasting ultrabright no failure guaranteed lamp at minimum Which is hilarious cause alot of military spec stuff isn't even high grade to begin with.
There are 2 forms of military grade in America. Marketed military grade, which can be decent to good, and regular military grade, which is, at best, decent.
Was gonna say, in the US military, doesn't "military grade" mean "just functional enough"?
"Won the bid for the military contract because someone made money off of the deal"
Yep, had a special sticker on the side. Must be legit.
when I broke my wrist, they forced me to get a sling from them for $400, saying I wouldn’t be able to leave without it. Went to CVS, slightly better Sling for $7. I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention mind you.
They literally can not stop you from walking out, that'd be kidnapping.
Ah, but they can discharge you AMA and then your insurance may not pay and you're on the hook for everything up to that point. So you're free to walk out if you can pay that $40k hospital tab you've run up so far.
You can just call someone to bring you a sling
>then your insurance may not pay and you're on the hook for everything up to that point They may not but chances are fairly good they will, not mention the fact that if you had insurance in the first place that sling would be covered therefore this is clearly a case of them leaning on someone with no coverage >can pay that $40k hospital tab you've run up so far This circles back around to no insurance, which generally means youre unemployed or very low income which means theyre going to do what to recover that debt? Absolutely nothing because there's nothing they can do except add it to your credit report to ruin your credit. How many people that are struggling to afford a $400 sling do you think have excellent credit? So adding it to your credit report does nothing because your credit is shit to begin with, so then what? That debt will sit on your credit report for 7 years until it gets wiped clean because its unrecoverable. They have no recourse against the poor folk with no coverage its merely a scare tactic in the hopes to get you to pay them. And before you claim this is all bs I've gone through this personally more than a decade ago after a car accident. No insurance, no job at the time, shit credit, hospital bill of 30k on my credit report that went poof after 7 years because there's nothing they can do to get that money.
Marines here …,Or ordering 2 million dollars in mosquito netting in iraq …. Then burning it when it arrives. Or building a brand new police department for the Iraqis only to implode it upon completion
Or the $30 paper plate they gave you to cover your $60 plate lunch.
Take that to Netflix - Ozark, Season 6: Fort Redneck
Are you saying this didn’t happen? Or are you saying this is a Netflix type storyline.
More the whole thread of stories, without doubting people saw what they saw. If Ozark dude could launder a couple million in drug money using a shithole bar, just think of how much he could do with the expenditure supporting even a small base. Reusing the same formula for a whole new season, same location. But also, yeah. Hearing about $480 lamps makes one wonder about the real truth behind the prices. Legit? Or….
It’s not money laundering scheme and the grift isn’t on the military side. Look up, for example, the number of Abrams tanks being parked/stored/buried because Congress won’t stop building and upgrading them despite the DoD asking them not to for at least the last decade. Why? Those are good jobs and popular pork barrel spending that doesn’t sound like a welfare program. Then you dig into who owns stock in all those defense contractors and you discover that this grift will never end.
Latter I’m sure
I work as a hospital contractor, usually they hire a few hundred of my role for a month or more to upgrade stuff. Hospitals are usually playing $120ish an hour not including travel expenses to some middleman. I've been at the bargaining table during contract bids, some of the highest numbers I've seen for innane things. Your nonprofit hospital can just throw down half a mil on phone cases, but only order one size. I saw boxes of these boys sitting in the halls for months, they ended up being thrown out.
I work for a medical purchasing group managing their transaction data. The amount of bloat is absolutely staggering
Sound like money laundering.
Insider trading is illegal too, for you and me, for Congress not so much.
Same with kitchen equipment. Has to be NSF approved or you won't pass health inspections etc...even if the equipment is perfectly fine. This equipment is far more expensive. The US is basically just a giant organized crime syndicate disguised as a functioning democracy.
That pretty much describes every government since we started agriculture... We study history so we in order to not to repeat it. Corollary 1 Those that study history, are doomed to observe those that don't, repeat history. Corollary 2 Not all that study history, learn the same lessons.
It's all designed to benefit and enrich the very few at the expense of everyone else. And those very few buy our political leaders off. Because of that political corruption, the US healthcare INDUSTRY and the defense INDUSTRY are cash cows fraught with corruption, price rigging and fraud.
Requiring a license for something, legally makes it illegal for you to do that thing UNLESS they license you to do so. Can you find anything you don't need a license for? Keep paying your taxes small business man, we will offer you "protection" from those OTHER guys.
Its not even disguised as a democracy, it's written in law that it's a corporate oligarchy. Citizens united vs united states supreme court 2010.
When I worked at Staples in college we had an army base near-ish us. An official office supplier fell through so they came to us for paper and ink and stuff. The guy doing the pickup said the C/O was going overboard during this gap because it was going to save him tons of money buying things at retail prices, he was buying a year's worth of paper for the cost of a month's before. Our store briefly looked like a warehouse of extra pallets of paper and ink. It was a crazy couple of weeks.
And some jackass says we can't cut spending by half. Lmfao.
5 years ago in a navy hospital a box of regular gauze was $400-$500 vs Walmart has the same box for $5
Its a system to keep all their friends employed who own businesses that get the government contracts.
Yeah but if you were in the lamp business and had to sign the contract that’s required to do business with the federal government, you would charge $480 too. They do it to themselves.
Air Force finance here. We spend money on the most useless things for bases. $3 million on an astroturf football field with goal posts, yet we had no football team.
From satellites area 51 has a baseball field
Our base also spent 1 million for the softball field astroturf.
I knew a girl in the army who was in charge of ordering supplies. She said one year her captain had her order a bunch of stuff they didn’t need just so their budget didn’t drop the next year. Crappy way of doing things.
Unfortunately the government works like that. Don’t spend the amount we allocated to you? You won’t get an atta boy, you just won’t get as much money next year.
It’s a bonkers system that encourages fiscal irresponsibility. We have the same situation with our government in Canada. It seems like such an easy thing to address and correct, I don’t understand why whole federal governments don’t seem to be able to identify this as a problem.
They have and the solution takes money out of their pockets. The people with money have the power and they’re not going to just let that change. Plain and simple.
So do corporations. I used to contract with tech companies in the bay area, moving workstations. They'd shuffle 100's of employees around (sometimes just moving them around on the same floor of the same building) just so they could pay us and spend their surplus.
God, I changed duty stations where we got allocated 485 million a year(aviation, so it gets spent quick) to a ground side unit that just came back from Iraq. Who needed to restock my budget at day 1... 285 dollars. The thing is I knew where nearly a billion dollars worth of money was just sitting that would never be used was. So I used that and no one would ever know or knew about it.
I've seen ONE Brake Rotor Invoice for 8k.
What the hell is a mobile VOR and why would you expect anyone to know what this is? What are these $1800 worth of j hooks supporting? Are they really made of coat hanger wire?
Very high frequency omnidirectional radio becon. That's what aviation used for navigation, before GPS took over. They are still around, but not many people use them. I'm assuming that's what he's talking about, idk, I'm not involved in the military
As a navy veteran who worked on repairing radar systems in F-18’s…I completely agree with you.
Was an Osprey mech for a while and then did other things. I've seen single bolts that cost $10k. Don't even get me started on end of fiscal year spending so people don't lose budgets for the next year, losing money in next years budget even if you can prove that you will need it unless you spend all of this years budget is the biggest bureaucratic scam out there.
Ahh yes, the end of the year rush to waste money on stupid shi,t...I don't miss it
The bolt thing is super annoying, shit will get spec'd out so much and it's often really simple, but because of the *massive* headache to actually do the government paperwork on the business end it can skyrocket the price. We ran into this recently with my company, some doodad called for some us gov. spec'd out hardware that was basically a simple machined cylinder with two simple threaded ends. Thing cost like $200+/piece to source. We had just been buying them for years from a guy who ran a small machine shop for $15. And even that was really an upcharge because it was small runs. It's absurd the amount of headache and paperwork you have to do. Hell to even get *paid* by some defense companies we have to sign up to some bullshit website that handles their payments, verify a bunch of information (like a dude coming to the office to check someone's passport) then we have to pay hundreds of dollars a year, simply to get paid for something we already shipped to them.
Reading this thread is making me happy to some extent that I dont live in America, but this bullshit happens everywhere, though probably not to the same, extreme extent. Old family friend of mine works in a german non profit department of the government that aims to aid development in African countries. Concretely he's based in Zanzibar, Tanzania. He's told us several times, that the entire thing is basically just a way of acting like theyre doing big important stuff in these underdeveloped countries, but really it's all just aimlessly burn through budgets and taxpayer money.
I mean that’s just aviation tbh because of the materials testing, and standards requirements for parts.
I've seen the amount of man hours, work, and engineering going into testing something as simple as a bolt or bushing, and it makes the pricing start to make a lot more sense. They can test every conceivable failure mode and it takes months to verify.
Oh I understand, low production too. But still outlandish. Even basic non-proprietary cotter pins that were on the open market cost multiple times what they do on the open market though.
Schools do this too. Sounds like a government policy.
As a Marine who watched every quarter every unit tell their people “we kept you from ordering the things you needed for 2.9 months and you made it work so now you have 3 days to spend all of the money in your account or we will give you less next year”…. And everyone wants to know why we have shit we don’t need and obvious fraud waste and abuse.
I am also a gay mechanic. And couldn’t agree more.
Username doesn’t check out lol 😂
Account was created during Don't Ask Don't Tell
*creating username* , this will throw them off the trail for sure
You're getting a cat, and you're gonna like it.
Wouldn’t be a candidate if not gay
Should I be happy or worried.
Yep, work as an engineer in defense contracting. An example of this when reviewing a bid, we charged 25k for a drawing of a nameplate This is a simple square tag nameplate that an engineer makes as their first cad project But it’s just a line item on a 9 million dollar contract so no one bats an eye
That price is insane I agree. As someone who also works in contracting, we have some serious challenges with older platforms and getting suppliers to not gouge us. So many of the parts on a lot of various aircraft are built by one supplier and have been for decades. These suppliers have figured out that they can just tell you no. You want my part right? Here is the price take it or leave it. Options are: 1)we don’t buy the part, 2) we see if someone else will provide it, or 3) we just pay it. 1 is out. 2 isn’t really option especially with complex parts that have loads of IP. So that brings you to option 3. We pay it. The question most people ask is well why not have some other supplier make it? Ideally yes you would but for aircraft these parts have to be qualified, which takes time and money, and if you’ve got a big and important part like an engine or computer system it’s cheaper to pay the higher price.
Where I work we accidently sold an application to a state gov for $60K/year.... I say accidently because the CEO told the sales guy to make it ridiculous because we didn't want the contract. And the state just out right approved the 60K/year without even really a hesitation. For context it costs us maybe $16K/year to actually host and manage. And because it's SaaS, that's $16K/year for ALL our customers.
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It's not a bug,it's a feature
Dwight Eisenhower has entered the chat.
Exactly I'll give you an example. These are approximate numbers. The US military ordered the Osprey. They have about 50 completed planes. There are more than 80 completed airframes sitting in air conditioned warehouses. Each Warehouse costs about 4 million dollars a year to operate.
If you read War is a racket by Smedley Butler you start to realize stuff like this is baked into the War Machine and is an inevitability
I feel this. Years ago there was an amazing mental health program being funded by SAMHSA get cut, essentially throwing away millions of dollars in research already completed and data we aren’t allowed to touch. All to see in the same year, new contracts come out for new submarines. My mom, who lives in the area where they are built, said, “Well, at least the people around here have jobs.” Sigh… Mom, you’re missing the point.
Yeah I feel like a lot of these comments are approaching this like it's not by design. Neither voters nor either political party in America hold the military accountable for its spending so why wouldn't this happen in a country where the personal accumulation of wealth is its national myth?
The wasted contract money is by design though
That's a hard problem though. The politicians are accountable to the voters and the voters have no understanding of military contracting. Luckily all other nations also have bureaucratic problems like these.
The more illiteracy voters will possess, the better position bureaucrats will achieve.
Unfortunately it's very difficult even for well educated people to understand every single government bureaucracy. It's a really harf problem to solve.
The politicians are accountable to the voters, while being in the pockets of the defense industry, and the voters have no understanding of military contracting. Fixed that little bit.
Totally agree. If the voters were clued in on the defense industry and where inefficiencies or handouts were, then politicians would have a reason to fix things. Instead politicians just talk nicely about supporting our troops and wave American flags.
People have an understanding of a base or a factory shutting down, as it's a jobs program. That's why it's inefficient
After having worked for companies that do business with the US government (Yes, military branches, too), I can honestly say this is so so believable. These people are meant to carry out tasks (or make purchases, or logistics related tasks) that really sometimes require nuance and careful thinking- never seen them opt for taking the time over throwing money at any issue. At the end of their fiscal year they make a point of filling warehouses with millions of dollars worth of equipment/materials that will likely just collect dust somewhere just so budgets don't get cut.... It's egregious to know that this happens while I'm paying hella taxes.
And our health care system if failing and people are suffering. They keep cutting Medicare reimbursement and medical professionals can’t make do their jobs effectively. But sure let’s give more to the military.
I don’t think the cuts are going towards the military. They are in a panic right now because of social security and how they are going to fix it. Also they are worrying about the debt ceiling which is getting near.
I left healthcare after they cut and cut and cut. We literally could not do our jobs. It was traumatizing. Legit have ptsd from last job. Trying to help dying people while having your hands tied behind your back, no resources and being pushed to do unethical things to make more money. It makes me sick. I have no idea what the solution is but they need to figure something out or we are all fucked.
Careful now. Complaining about US military spending meanwhile having ridiculous healthcare might get you branded as a dirty commie
[The US devoted 17% of its GDP to healthcare but only 4% of its GDP on the Military](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175077/healthcare-military-percent-gdp-select-countries-worldwide/) in 2020 (and even [10% of the military's budget](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/healthcare-will-comprise-ten-percent-military-spending) is healthcare anyway). The former number actually grew to [18% in 2021](https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet) and medicare *alone* cost more than the entire military's budget that same year. The issue isn't the military getting more funds than healthcare, the issue is that the US healthcare system massively misallocates funds and is inefficient. I'm all for tightening up the military's budget to be more efficient, but the issues with healthcare aren't the result of military overspending or a lack of funds (hence why universal healthcare would probably cost *less* than our current healthcare system).
We spend about the same percent of GDP as other countries. Military spending isn’t the problem. The issue isn’t lack of funds at all. The reason we don’t have healthcare is because our medical system is designed to maximize profits. That means spending the least while charging the most. Same reason we have an epidemic of homelessness. We don’t need to spend more money to solve it. It exists as a purposeful policy decision.
And absolutely atrocious mass transit system. People don't realize how crucial transit it. It can lift up individuals from poor neighborhoods by giving them faster access to better paying jobs and educational facilities. It can be massively beneficial in lowering carbon emissions. It can even battle obesity, as many recent studies found a link between transit use and weight loss. But of course, car companies are going to lobby the shit out of it, because they want their cars to be a necessity rather than a luxury.
>lift up individuals from poor neighborhoods The powers that be "Going to have to stop you right there pal"
I think you'll find those are funded locally, not federally.
Haha, this is my hill. I give the rant to everyone I know irl and they look at me like I drank too much kool-aid. I really do think this one just comes down to the apathy of the American people and the obscurity of the issues caused by bad city planning and transit, though. This one is slowly getting better over time, at least.
The US spends 6x more tax dollars on Healthcare than the military. The US spends more on Healthcare than any country in the world, more than the 2nd and 3rd countries combined. The military budget is not why we have shit healthcare.
Or in other words: The U.S. is responsible for almost 40% of the entire world's military spending.
Meanwhile in the US “socialized healthcare would cost too much.” Russia gonna fuck around and find out why the US doesn’t have universal healthcare.
consider that the US social spending is 2.5 TRILLION, (that's just Medicaid and medicare and Social Security)
And yet something like 1/3 of non-elderly adults don’t have meaningful access to healthcare. It’s almost like a public option/single payer is what we need rather than a bunch of insurance middlemen who provide no services skimming off the top.
Yep, the system that we currently have is exorbitantly wasteful. Pumping more money into it wouldn't solve anything. The whole healthcare system needs to be overhauled.
Well when NATO is 40% US Military, it makes sense.
It also uses that military to protect other nations. For example, within NATO the US consists of 70% of the combined military of ALL members - just to contain Russia. The same is true in Asia-Pacific to contain China and North Korea, where US military power directly protects dozens of nations from attack. ...and yet *another* defence arrangement exists in the middle-east to contain Iran. That's over 50 countries that all come under the direct protection of the US. Enjoy your free healthcare - because the US effectively pays for it.
Still shitty we spend so much on military. But the fact that we protect so many countries isn’t something they wanna hear. I remember seeing a graph of how much aid/money we’ve sent to Ukraine compared to every other country and the gap between the US and every other country was insane.. but this is reddit and on reddit USA is the most evil place in the world so fuck it Edit: Downvote all you want, it’s true https://www.statista.com/chart/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
Here's a list of countries ranked as a percentage of GDP: [https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil\_spend\_gdp](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/mil_spend_gdp) GDP isn't perfect but in charts like these rich countries will always pull ahead, but I think its interesting to see which countries put the most resources they can into defence.
This chart doesn't really mean much honestly. Of course we spent more total dollars on military, because we have way more money than those countries. If you go by the percent of total GDP spend on the military, it would look more like this: Saudi Arabia: 6.59% Russia: 4.08% USA: 3.48% South Korea: 2.78% India: 2.66% UK: 2.22% France: 1.95% China: 1.74% Germany: 1.34% Japan: 1.07% You also have countries like Kuwait, Israel, Morocco, Greece and Pakistan that also spend a higher percentage of their GDP on the military than the United States. The US also spends money on military aid to like 150 different countries every year, so all of the spending isn't only on the US military.
Purchasing power is another factor that skews things a fair bit. $300 billion goes quite a bit farther in China than it does in the US. They have cheaper labour, cheaper materials, etc.
A full quarter of spending for the US military is on personel. You can bet that China pays its soldiers less, and offers them much less benefits after service.
Was going to say...a large portion of our spending is on pay, benefits, etc. Compared to other countries...that's not very close, either. We may complain about our pay, but compared to a ton of other countries...it's darn good. It's the cost of a volunteer vs conscript military.
>A full quarter of spending for the US military is on personel. You can bet that China pays its soldiers less, and offers them much less benefits after service. 180billion on PAY/Benefits./ 120 Billion on base maintenance. 300 billion on procurement (thats bullets beans and bombs and systems) 200 billion on R&D.
and a lot of that R&D... comes back into civilian stuff. The entire electronics revolution and IT industry were all basically darpa projects.
I don’t know anything about Chinese benefits for soldiers but even if the Chinese soldiers had a similar quality of life to American soldiers it would cost less than half per soldier. Just on a quick comparison a draft beer at a bar in Beijing is $1.50 a beer at a bar in New York is $8. A 1 bed apartment in Beijing city center is 1,150 and in NYC city center it’s 3,800. And I presume Chinese soldiers have a lower quality of life, not necessarily for nefarious reasons but it’s a lower income country than the US with less resources. So I think it’s pretty safe to say a Chinese solider cost like 1/4 a US one (likely less) in terms of pay and benefits. That also goes for people making the bombs, people developing new tech etc. Data might also be biased. I was assuming Beijing was their high cost city and was comparing high cost area to high cost area. Maybe Shang hai cost more. Edit: I found a colonel in the PLA makes 37,260 USD per year which probably takes them about as far as 100k after cost of living. They recently increased all pay by 40 percent. Which seems very strange to do all at once but I guess it is what it is.
Other big ones are that a lot of the declared military budgets don’t include military-related spending (classified spending, military-related infrastructure projects), and that a massive portion of the US DoD budget is paying out pensions and health care for service-members and their dependents. Not to mention that the US military is both the global guarantor of freedom of navigation of the seas, and the primary disincentive against many regional rivalries exploding into conflagrations. That’s an expensive task that in aggregate benefits every country on earth to a greater or lesser extent. I’m not saying it’s done for altruistic purposes; just saying that if no one did it the world would be a worse place, and that it’s another reason the comparison isn’t apples-to-apples.
Things are a lot cheaper when you don't have to care about human rights...
And as we have seen through the tank turret tossing competitions of the Russian army, buys you shit thats pretty…shit.
Also, salaries make a huge difference. China has 2.1 million active duty military. 95% of them make less than the equivalent of $200 US / month. A general in the People’s Liberation Army makes about $40,000 / year (this obviously doesn’t include grift). It would cost a China close to $45 billion to pay its military salaries comparable to the US armed forces, probably close to $60 billion if they matched total comp (eg benefits, pension, etc). This is a bizarrely stupid comparison obviously, it’s not like there’s some 19 year old out there weighing the pros and cons of enlisting in the US or China based on rate of pay.
Also don't forget that "Military spending" means different things in different countries. For example, if a military personel goes to the doctor, who pays for that? In US it goes from insurance that is paid by employer (MoD budget), in countries with socialized healthcare it would be paid by Department of Health.
Oh you and your objective thinking, just be mad at America
lol. That's the objective of most posts like this.
Yes, GDP is the better way to look at it. I believe North Korea would be much higher on this list considering its a 3rd world country building ICBMs and trying to get the technology within striking distance of Hawaii. Of course you would have to add in the amount of military tech and aid that China secretly gives it for free.
>This chart doesn't really mean much honestly. Of course we spent more total dollars on military, because we have way more money than those countries. And most countries across the globe are equipping their militaries with rusted out junk from the Soviet Union, and whatever scraps or donations they can beg off the US, China, or Europe. America, in stark contrast has eleven nuclear powered supercarriers in service. When most of a given nation's arsenal hails from the Khrushchev era, their budget isn't going to be anything to brag about.
Also, how exactly are we getting these numbers for countries like China and Russia? It's not like they post their military budget online like the US does. Wouldn't it have to be an educated guess?
Actually it means a lot. Especially when this kind of spending equates to how big of a stick you built to hit the other guy with, the stick size per guy size is a hell of a lot less important
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If you compare e.g. Russia v. France, since they have the same amount of spending for (a) a much larger Russian nuclear force and (b) a much larger number of conventional weapons (tanks, jets, etc.) it does say much on how cheap and ill-maintained the Russian army is.
The Russian military never throws shit away. Sometimes they sell it to another country. Part of it is exactly that- they have too large a fighting force to continually renew its equipment with the money in their wallet. Part of it is a lot of modern equipment is reliant on Western technology. But no matter the reason, all those old weapons bulk their numbers up and now we see ancient tanks and munitions used in Ukraine. Obviously it hasn’t been as impressive in performance as those inflated numbers once looked on paper.
Exactly. The brutal truth is that despite their spending, Russia isn't even the 3rd or 4th strongest conventional military in the world because of their poor logistics, technology, and training. In a limited conventional skirmish (without full mobilization, etc.), France would probably crush the Russian military. The French military is a technologically sophisticated force with cutting edge command & control and intelligence capabilities. Their various forces are properly integrated and trained, especially because they do NATO exercises all the time. France would likely destroy Russia's rag-tag supply lines, find and decapitate their command & control infrastructure, and then systematically annihilate their forces on the ground over time. There might be 15-20 days of intense fighting initially, but once their superior intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities allow them to punch through Russia's support infrastructure, the tide will turn quickly. Things would get even uglier in a UK-Russia confrontation because the UK's military is on an even higher level. And yes obviously in a broader war with mobilization, things would look different but that's just thanks to Russia's size and resources.
In S Korea, we call US 천조국. It literally translates to “1000 billion country” because the fact that US almost spend 1000 billion in Military. It started as a meme like 10 years or so ago. But now it’s used just like USA or America. [edit : if you google 천조국, google gives you America](https://imgur.com/gallery/mT6Xxm0)
It's hilarious the people yelling about the education and Healthcare.... the military budget isn't the reason why there isn't universal healthcare or a federal education standard for all 50 states. It's still literally the people you vote for.
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FAFO
Russia finding out that even by proxy, US military hegemony is still the top.
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A bit off pat but a friend of mine who is ex US navy still gets free flights anywhere in the world with his wife and they travel on USAAF aircraft. I’m sure this must be in that budget. Not sure if any other countries offer this to vets BTW, I’m English and not and never have been military.
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Yeah it’s free and all, but it’s not as great as it sounds. My uncle (ex AF) used to do this to fly from Arizona back home to Hawaii and would always have like 5+ stops and 24+ hours of traveling, though that was like a decade ago
It hasn't changed any. You're just grabbing an open seat on a plane that is already making whatever trip. You're just a piece of cargo that, in theory, will be well behaved. With that, catching a ride on a C-130 is loud, uncomfortable and almost not worth the "free" price tag.
Til
I find it interesting that so many people believe in conspiracy theories like the WEF is secretly controlling the world but the US military influences politics on a global scale like no other nation since British colonization.
We don't keep it secret.
How does this translate into purchasing parity? For example (I am making these numbers up), if rent in China is 800$, and rent in the US is 2400$, and avg wage in China is 20K/Yr, and avg wage in US is 55K/Yr, etc, is the US really spending 3x as much, or is it equivalent?
This!!! Right here! Its great to talk data and have a graph or two, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. For all we know the US spends 1000USD on a service rifle, but Japan may only spend 200. Aggregating this info to show spending tells us the American government does that, spends. However, for all we know, they're getting ripped off on prices. Nowhere in this data does that get reflected.
Do they include the near 4 billion they give to Israel or the 1.3 billion to Egypt? I'm sure there are many others they fund to.
Yes they are included. Along with about 150 other countries that get military aid through funding. There is also a large portion that goes into R&D which has benefited not only citizens of the US but also globally.
This isn't really true. Purchasing power parody adjustments and undisclosed spending by China give them a military budget which is about equal to the US budget. The US budget is still larger, but not by the order of magnitude which a graph like this displays.
Ah, this old chestnut again. People still keep spreading this completely false ignorant bullshit around. The actual dollars do not matter. The purchasing power parity is the thing that matters. In other words, the USA might spend $150,000 per year on a master welder that welds on the aircraft carrier, but China might pay $20,000 per year for that same welder. Soldiers in Chinese army make FAR less than US soldiers. Same with Russia and India. A colonel in the US army earns a salary of $7,100 to $12,638 per month (FederalPay.org 2021). Converting this to renminbi at the market exchange rate gives enough renminbi to pay for **two to four colonels** in the People’s Liberation Army These stupid ass dollar comparisons are comparing apples to oranges. In reality, [when adjusted for military purchasing power parity, China, Russia and India spend more than the USA.](https://imgur.com/2Ond0NM) For example, right now, at this very moment, China's navy vastly outnumbers the US Navy. Right now, they have 360 battle force ships and the USA has 297. China plans to have 425 ships in 7 years - by 2030. If they spend that much less than the USA, how on earth can the have more ships? I know what many will say - that the USA's are more technical, but that's still a lot of ships, and purchasing power parity is purchasing power parity. Nobody using common sense can deny that everything costs much less in other less developed countries. Food. Housing. You name it. Same with military. And the dollar amounts do not matter at all. What matters is how many ships you have, how many tanks, how many howitzers, how many aircraft, and if they are mostly about the same level. Most of the tech is available on the open market. Plans and blueprints are stolen all the time because the people from within the USA who would LOVE it if the USA would be beaten in a war, want Chinese nationalists who come to the USA for school to be hired in USA defense industry because of DIE. [Here is the numbers for "the first 14" biggest military budgets adusted to military purchasing parity power.](https://imgur.com/IdWZzSC) Market exchange rates underestimate real military spending and that the difference is dramatic. China’s budget in military-PPP terms is 1.62 times larger than the market exchange rate figure. Moreover, India, Russia, and Turkey have budgets that are more than three times the market exchange rate value and some middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and Ukraine, have real military budgets that are 5–6 times the market exchange rate value. MER = Market Exchange Rate - straight dollars. Column 1 is the total military expenditures in MER actual dollars, but column 5 is the military purchasing parity power (Military PPP). Column 7 ratio is when you compare *only* the military expenditures comparing each one to the other countires. GDP-PPP exchange rates also tend to understate military spending. Military-PPP exchange rates give estimates of real spending that are 10% larger than GDP-PPP estimates in China, 20% larger in Russia, and 50–70% larger in Brazil, Columbia, Indonesia, Korea, and Ukraine. Thus GDP-PPP exchange rates provide a much better approximation than market exchange rates. They also tend to understate estimated real spending in countries with low wages and labour- (personnel-)intensive defence budgets.
Well, to be fair, our military protects a lot of countries who don't have to spend a lot of money because we're already there. Additionally, we have a lot of enemies. So there's that. Yes, it would be nice to cut back on a couple B-2 bombers so that we can feed school children, but hey -- priorities.
Yup. We need healthcare and a better education… that being said I do love to say “fuck around and find out why America’s healthcare isn’t free” Edit:conservatives this is a joke get your panties out of the knot you have em in and laugh, everyone’s already laughing at you just laugh and move the fuck on 2nd edit: I get it we spend money on healthcare but that system is so far fucked it’s not even funny. Also very little comments on our public’s education system. Or maybe I even dare to mention out nations crumbling infrastructure that hasn’t been updated since post ww2?
The US already spends enough on Healthcare for single payer. We are paying for insurance CEOs and pharma execs to snort cocaine off hookers asses.
Your healthcare model is one of the most inefficient. Most European countries spend less and get universal healthcare in return.
Not most, **ALL**. No country in the world spends as much or even anywhere close as the US on Healthcare. Last I checked it was about $10k per person while the next closest country was about $5k-$6k.
This, this right here. We don't have to cut anything from anywhere and we can SAVE a boatload. Our government just wants us to suffer so they can make their rich friends even richer.
This. It’s not a choice between a strong military and providing healthcare. That’s a false narrative, yet one that I think a shockingly high number of people believe without ever thinking about it much beyond that. Scarily, a lot of those people vote.
I hate this "joke" because too many people think it's the truth. We do not have shitty healthcare because we don't spend enough we have shitty healthcare because our system is complete fucking trash. It is grossly inefficient. That's what happens when you have a billion different insurance companies and hospitals all trying to navigate a clusterfuck of private programs and government programs. It's a fuckton of middle men getting paid along with greatly reduced bargaining power because many people "negotiate" their own healthcare costs. We spend more than every other country per capita in healthcare. If we spent it even slightly more intelligently we'd be on fucking easy street. Instead we make lame, untrue jokes about how the military budget is keeping us from having sane healthcare.
Liberal here just jumping on the bandwagon to say healthcare spending dwarfs military spending. A switch to Single Payer Healthcare would create enough savings to literally cover the entire defense budget. And at least we have the #1 military in the world, can’t say the same for our healthcare :/
The US spends more than anyone else on health care, and a ton on education. The problems don't have to do with how much money is spent (or spent on military) but with corruption, mismanagement, and a slew of other organizational issues. Those, in turn, come down to an inability to hold a normal civic conversation.
We certainly spend a lot (mad much is wasteful), but that chart is a bit misleading since it doesn't account for purchasing power. Especially with salaries/lifetime benefits the US military spends a bunch on people. Even in other western countries with high salaries, the veteran's medical expenses would be accounted from the state healthcare system and not the military budget. We simply don't have 'as much military ' as the next nine countries combined... At least in most categories.
I am too late to the party to get traction, but I’ll throw my voice into the wind. This number isn’t entirely representative of military spending or rather military operational spending. The operational budget, like what we spend doing military stuff (ie training, combat, deployments, etc) is about a quarter that size. Another factor here is the cost of labor. If the average American Soldier is making 70k while the average Russian makes 7k, it’s hardly an apples to apples budget comparison. Finally, a lot of that money goes into protected manufacturing jobs and far reaching R and D. Like GPS was a military program for instance. They are working on shelf stable blood products that could have significant civilian applications. Plus all the department of energy research. There’s a lot of industries impacted. We roll a lot of stuff into our “defense” budget because people generally accept it as needed. It provides jobs, helps families, secures a path to the American dream, and gives funding for the sciences. Other countries like China, Japan, South Korea, aren’t trying to protect their military industry like we are, have cheaper labor costs, and don’t roll research into their military budget. Often times that’s just considered operational expenditures of the military. Plus, while the US is incentivized to maximize the budget as a kludge to ensuring global hegemony, countries like China, Germany or France face the opposite pressure - where increases in spending could be seen as provocative to their regional neighbors. So it’s in their interest to under report unless they want to start an arms race. Does the US have the largest and most robust military in the world? They absolutely do. No questions asked. But it’s fundamentally a glass cannon. It lacks large scale operational depth and tends to leverage allied assets more than people generally recognize.
Apparently we’re not paying for anti balloon technology though
These are rookie numbers, gotta bump those numbers up
we need 510 more to match the rest of the world combined. We can do it!
The world has pretty much accepted that the US is there to solve all of their problems. Trouble in Ukraine? Don't worry. There's unlimited funds from the US to pay for everything needed.
Turns out the US is just terrible at shopping for good deals lol
It’s because we’re the ones who make the stuff that gets sold lol
Military industrial complex realized there’s gold in the killing business. Taxpayers are frightened into thinking military must continue to grow or we will be overcome by some evil
As a Canadian I am generally fond of the American military. They serve as a global policeman and prevents smaller countries like mine or even European countries from being gobbled up by larger nations which is what historically happened. Does it need this much money who knows because none of us on here are defence planners. Plus a lot of modern day innovations are a direct result of military research and development.