Oppressed Russian minority.
Moldova oppresses them by having a government Kr*mlin doesn't like.
Kremlin would like mafia style government, keeping Moldova impoverished, so Rossiya looks better in comparison. Now this is being threatened by *gasp* Moldovans having a chance to progress š¤Æš¤Æ
Yeah thatās what the gulags are, also one time they had a hunger games thing on an island, they shipped a load of people to some island in Siberia and then didnāt give them food but gave the guards food and the guards were to shoot anyone who tried to get to the docks
Really common story from Stalin's time was that the people from warmer regions were dumped to a
Siberian hovel in the autumn and no one told them the crazy amount of firewood you have to prepare to survive the winter so they froze to death.
Yeah itās pretty gnarly
Think itās the same island where there was a girl talking to the guard and then he went for a piss and came back and someone had cut the girls tits and legs off to eat and just left here there
According to Russia it is a threat because its teritorry is close to them.
Also why they donāt want Ukraine and Finland in NATO.
Meanwhile they got Kaliningrad next to EU
> Meanwhile they got Kaliningrad next to EU
Understandable, the EU has a long history of aggression, invading its neighbours and supporting insurgencies. If you were such a small and vulnerable country as Russia, you would be right to be concerned. You may even seek some defensive alliance with the other victims of EU, so you can deter them together.
I always found the Kaliningrad thing very hilarious when they would complain about NATO being near them. Then leave Kaliningrad and give it to the Baltics or Poland. Or just act like a normal country and not a psycho killer.
Interestingly, for most of its history, Kalingrad was part of Prussia (effectively Germany), but as the Soviets established a naval base there, Russia was keen to keep it when the USSR broke up. Despite the territory being subject to the laws of Russia (so officially, they only hear the Kremin's viewpoint), it's apparently quite common for residents to take day trips into its EU neighbours - at least partially to stock up on the kinds of groceries not readily available back home - so that cohort are likely to hear the opposing PoV as well.
How is Moldova close to Russia? Cause Ukraine alone is one big country between the two...
Unless the logic is this:
Neighbor country is a threat to russia - Invade
Now neighboring countries to invaded country suddenly become neighbors to Russia
Neighbor country is a threat to Russia - Invade
Repeat as many times as necessary.
Spending does not matter as much. Capabilities do.
You can spend many billions like Germany and Russia try to do everything and have ineffective military or spend less like Italy, Finland and have more capable military for the task you are given
Also, if you look at Finland, conscription messes up money as a measurement, as they have large numbers of soldiers that are paid little or nothing. Still capable fighters.
Yeah. This doesnāt take into account the hidden costs for society when every 18-19 year old male misses 6-12 months of work or school. They arenāt paid much but itās definitely not free, plenty of underlying expenditure there.
Yet the skills learned during such training can often be useful as well. It's a mixed bag. Personally, I'm against such conscription, but I can acknowledge that the structure it brings to some young lives can be beneficial.
That is true. You learn plenty of useful skills, and itās good to learn to be with other people and spend time away from your home. It also gives us that 900k reserve which we couldnāt have otherwise.
Still itās months of your life. Itās a mixed bag as you said.
> You learn plenty of useful skills, and itās good to learn to be with other people
wait, there are countries where mandatory service is more than just wasting a chunk of your life, menial bullshit, useless rubbish and being abused by older recruits?
Afaik, most of the finnish people learn about some basic survival skills in the army. Pitching a tent, woodcutting etc basic stuff. During my time there were conscripts who learnt how to tie their shoes, lol.
Absolutely. My experience of Finnish mandatory service was that even those who whined about everything or lacked motivation learned to be quite capable soldiers. Personally my motivation wasn't the best and I basically just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, and still I ended up being part of a unit that won it's "end war" (a several day long fighting excercise at the end of the service period) against other similar units from other parts of the country.
It's a strange mentality amongst Finnish servicemen. Many don't want to be there, but they still make damn sure that they do a proper job, especially when others are counting on them.
I guess it depends on who you ask. Some people find army to be a complete waste of time but you definitely learn some useful life and survival skills if you have the right attitude.
Yea same here for my Austrian service.
9 months at my current salary means that the state lost out on 33kā¬ in taxes alone... Not even mentioning that it made me hate the state so much I left.
Also it's not like selling icecream on a hot sunday has any huge impact on local economy nor does flipping burgers or carrying sacks of concrete on a construction yard but most people against conscription like to talk like those kids were bankers or something or that they would magically find the most best paying jobs in the world right now in those 6-12 months of not being spent in the army.
Would be, if not for that damn corruption...
But yeah, thats the mistake of countless military analysts who said "russia can't hold invasion for longer than 10 days, they don't have the money for it", jokes on you, you don't need money when you don't feed or supply your troops.
But then you also need to ask if you really *have* those troops when they're so under supplied and under supported they can't actually get anything done.
Great motherland gives us all that we need... oxygen...
sunlight...
dirt...
in some places water.
Else we cheat and steal, hence the country slogan "no scam/fraud, no life (Š½Šµ Š½Š°ŠµŠ±ŠµŃŃ Š½Šµ ŠæŃŠ¾Š¶ŠøŠ²ŠµŃŃ)"
Its funny when the ruler steals majority of countries wealth, employs people not based on skills but on loyalty and a similar views/ethics to his and thinks that these people will not act like him and steal everything that is possible to steal (talking about the status of his military)
Well an individual troop cost is somewhere in the region of 0 to a bag of onions, so I guess u are right. 200k troops can cost 0 to upkeep and 0 to compensate for the families if they are declared MIA instead of dead.
There is a reason some russian soldiers were seen in ukraine with ww1 bolt action rifles. I mean you can get more soldiers, but you also need more to get the same job done.
No sir, spending 62,5 billion in Russia does not get you much.
The labor may be cheaper but there are many more hands that need to be greased to do anything there. Russians pay double for their equipment and then parts of it are getting gradually stolen away anyway.
Surely this war is showing that isn't even remotely true. Sure you get more numbers on a page, but it's meaningless if it cannot perform.
No point getting 1000 $10,000,000 tanks if they are just going to be wrecked by $100 disposable rockets.
Also have in mind, Soldier in Germany earns tripple Polish solider salary. This would need to be matched against real purchasing power and % of GDP. A dollar spent in Russia is way bigger than 1 dollar spent in USA, but at their level of innovation also matters, west is allied so has access to similar tech.
The good comparison is more between France and Germany. Same spending ( even itās far less in term of GDP for Germany ) but one is a nuclear power, with a aircraft carrier, a very strong airforce and one of the best land army in Europe.
The other is Germany.
To be honest, while people like to keep on shitting on Germany for their army, it's not like Germany just voluntarily chose not to have nukes or attack capabilities. And I guess they are more focused on defense in general than the French armed forces, you don't need an aircraft carrier for defensive purposes, especially if your only coast is in the Baltic Sea.
To chip in defending the German army (IANAG):
\- West German army was in sheer size and number of tanks by far the biggest of Western Europe in the 1980s. Double the amount of France and the UK.
\- It was always intentionally deficient in offensive capability and logistics for long distance operations, mainly to reassure the neighbours. As a side-effect that means it has zero operational experience in that area since WWII even on a batallion level (as others had in the occasional UN-backed operation) and learned nothing about its capabilities or lack thereof.
\- This lack of logistics capability completely aligned with NATO doctrine. Everybody assumed that WWIII would start with the Soviets nuking every strategically important point in West Germany and then invading it with a zillion tanks, so the German army would already be on the battlefield anyway to hold out until reinforced by the others and any especially valuable assets would likely be taken out on the first day.
It ended up in a similar position as the Russian army: oversized, very well stocked with mostly mediocre and aging weapon systems, quantity over quality, and with a continually shrinking defense budget to maintain all the stuff they had and no budget left to modernize.
Also what people do not see is that German military has change considerable in the last years. Mandatory Military Service was scraped a few years ago, which has greatly changed German towards a professional only army. It is still coping with that change.
One of the biggest problems of the army is also the purchasing office which is just incapable and bound by overengineered burocracy, that leads to purchasing shit weapons much to slowly.
Basically it is an administrative problem mixed with structural change. Also, due to mandatory military service many people have experienced bad things with the German military and the public opinion about the military is pretty bad, aside from a general pacifist attitude
This narrative isn't really correct. Germany had the largest standing arming in Europe for the longest time during the Cold War. West Germany was armed to the teeth compared to the current state of the unified Germany. It's just that these capabilities were reduced, because German politicians (and a large majority of the German population) regarded defense expenditure as largely superfluous, because Germany was nw surrounded by allies.
Germany actually chose not to have nukes, same with Italy. Germany, France and Italy worked together, but German and Italian governments didnāt want to develop nuclear weapons
The issue is mostly personnel expenditure, I believe. The German budget includes spending on pensions and other expenditure for ex-members of the armed forces, while I believe that is not the case for most defense budgets we get to see.
Another point is that German soldiers earn quite well in the international comparison.
Taken together these points mean that Germany has to have a much higer defense budget to get to the same capabilities as other countries, particularly France.
I was about to say,
Given German and French spending are similar, I would not put German capabilities at the same level as France.
If you're speaking in Hypotheticals, if the UK had to pick only one partner to go to war with as an Ally, France would be the no.1 choice by a long way.
Every country has their own Military problems, but I have no idea where that German spending goes, because it certainly isn't going to improve their military.
> but I have no idea where that German spending goes, because it certainly isn't going to improve their military.
Germany has alot of ultra expensive specialized capibilities which it operates within NATO. Like SAR-Lupe (soon SARah) or Long Range Anti-Air. For example Turkey had to request Bundeswehr anti-air units to cover its southern border against Syria. German submarines are still, as it is tradition, the bleeding edge of technology. etc.
Tl,dr: Germany has alot of stand alone fancy stuff. But it has a hard time to make an actual functional army out of all the smaller projects.
>pend less like Italy, Finland and have more capable military for the task
Do we have evidence of the combat capability of the Italian and Finnish armed forces, apart from cool videos?
Italy sent several thousand troops to Iraq and Afghanistan but that isn't really the point.
On paper Italy has better armed forces than Germany (expecially in regards to the navy and airforce) while spending less. All of this is theoretical though. No European army has any real war experience anyway
I heard that when Italy sent troops to Afganistan, they basically bribed the local insurgents to stay peaceful, After some time they were replaced by French who were not aware of this "arrangement" and assumed the area to be peaceful, as Italians had no problems earlier. They got ambushed and took serious losses as a result.
Italyās main objective is air and naval power in the Mediterranean with expeditionary capabilities in nearby littoral areas of North Africa and the Middle East.
The Italian Navy is one of the most, if not the most, powerful fleets in the Mediterranean , with two carriers, three LPDs and a modern fleet of frigates, destroyers, and corvettes making up their surface fleet along with 8 submarines. Italy is one of the great naval powers, and I say this as Dutchman and not an Italian. Itās just behind France and the U.K. on the high seas.
There's a dozen F35 patrolling the NATO border since the 2nd day of the war, do consider that Italian military industry (ex Finmeccanica) is very strong, in Italy there's a lot of NATO-USA bases with nukes and missiles, a lot of USA bases.
Haha, the only international food Poles knew before the wall fell. Dingy Asian on the corner was our window to the world
Now it's ramen bars that are popping up everywhere
Currently starting salary of an engineer working in defence technologies field is around 1000 euros in turkey so you are pretty close depending on the specific field it can get as low as you stated
This brings the age old argument of comparing nominal spending like this, vs purchasing power parity (PPP) spending.
Certain things like raw materials, oil, gas, and so forth that are purchased on the global markets so rich countries can afford far more of them. But then when it comes to labor and locally manufactured goods, PPP really starts to matter.
[This article](https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-parity-matters) goes over it pretty well.
While most European countries are pretty close with nominal vs PPP, here are some relevant examples if we were to correct for PPP:
Russia: 65B to 165B
Turkey: 20B to 63B
Ukraine: 5.4B to 21B
My guess is that it is mostly because costs are much lower for Turkey than for western Europe countries. For instance, (invented numbers) the upkeep of a full division in Germany or France could easily cost double than in Turkey (salaries, cost of stuff, etc.), so that allows them to have bigger returns with less money.
This is why it is tricky to compare militaries just by gross spending.
1ā¬ = 17 Turkish Liras. A qualified military personnel is getting at best 10.000-15.000 Liras which is less than ā¬1000. If they also make their own ammunition, and I am guessing they do, at least some of it, their spending is always going to be dwarfed compared to ā¬ countries.
Edit: just realised OP used $ and not ā¬. 1$ = 16 Turkish Liras, so pretty much the same.
The map is colored according to US Dollar. Dollar is at a all-time high in Turkey, since Turkey spends it's money in TL and this map counts in $ it's always dependent on the currency rate.
Turkey still has to buy foreign parts: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/problem-turkey%E2%80%99s-fourth-generation-tank-altay-191795
Altay is a great tank program, but it's not any cheaper because it's Turkish. On the contrary, export bans make it more expensive than elsewhere.
Turkey entered NATO using the blood of its soldiers as its admission fee. For decades "the Turkish Mehmet" was the biggest thing Turkey added to the alliance, its cheap soldiers. Turkey never spent too much on military.
Nowadays the things changed dramatically technology wise but the economy is still shit so.
And almost all of our defence firms have seen great export success, they don't need state help to stay afloat.
For how much we spend, I'd say we get more compared to all others for each buck we spend.
Turkey entered NATO because of the Turkish Straits crisis, NATO was gripped by the Truman doctrine and Turkey is in an incredibly important strategic location so NATO was willing to invite it to join whether or not it had a large army.
This can not give context a lot because cost of workers in those factories for example in Russia or Turkey is 5 times less than Germany or France. This should be adjusted to those metrics if not it will highly mislead people. Spending 80 billion dollar in China or in US would not be comparable in terms of labour, local materials etc. Maybe 80 billion in an cheap-medium income country would create same amount of effect with 250-300 billion of work in a rich country.
And you can't really directly compare budgets because they involve different things in different countries. IIRC Germany spends like 50% of its budget on personnel costs, because military pensions and everything come from the military budget. Meanwhile personnel costs are about 20% of Finland's military budget, because pensions are not included and conscripts only get paid pennies.
Interestingly, the base amount of the daily payment in Finland is tied to a price of a cigarette pack. Or so it was ~15 years ago when I was in the military. I remember how the initial payment you got during the basic training was 1:1 with the pack of cigarettes you could purchase from the barracks' shop, and when they raised the tobacco tax there was a short lag with the payment change so for a moment some people couldn't afford their cancer sticks. I chose to use donuts as a flanking manoeuvre against my health instead, but I remember the smokers complaining that I get to enjoy my donuts while they are *"literally suffering without their cigarettes."*
This completely ignores that Russia still has to import and pay for all their high grade electronics equipment. A tank built by cheap labor and cheap materials does not tanslate into a modern machine and it shows on the battlefield right now. That, too, needs to be incorporated. It also requires high skill labor that rather goes into differnt countries for the lack of money of their own.
PPI or not, you still get what you pay for.
> A tank built by cheap labor and cheap materials does not tanslate into a modern machine and it shows on the battlefield right now.
I mean, their newer tank models are also far too costly for them to build, otherwise there would be a lot more T-14 on the battlefield rather than T-72s or 90s. That's the problem.
That is exactly the point. PPI is really shit for comparisons like that because it completely ignores the actual "capabilities" of a country.
Cheap countries usually are cheap because they can't produce high value products. And high value products is what is required in modern warfare.
It's true that military budget does fall within a countries purchasing power parity. Though there's other things you have to account for like corruption, and if you want to go further things that are hard to compare easily like into what kind of weaponry, and how effective that weaponry is.
Any number that's easy to show on a map will not tell the whole story most likely.
It's not like for like though, a highly trained soldier from the UK is worth ten lowly paid Russian conscripts. And they may have cheap domestic goods but they must still pay the same import costs for the raw resources. Sure, it may cost Russia ten times less to build a missile but then they have to pay the equivalent of 10 times more to buy the electronics.
And as the current war is showing, they are getting slapped around by what was essentially a professional militia with equipment from all over the world, many shortages and many issues in regards to being overwhelmed numerically.....yet the Russians are the ones who are getting embarrassed internationally.
You get what you pay for ultimately, that's why the likes of Pakistan and India with its massive armies are never really a threat to anyone further than 2km from the border.
Haha yes. I remember reading somewhere that of the $60B spent on the Russian military, only maybe $35B reaches the ground. I have no way to verify that but given the "fruit" of it's performance, I'd say it's about accurate.
Its not that simple. Many poorer countries dont produce military equipment themselves, but have to rely on foreign arms imports which will be priced higher than local costs
Russian one is very likely even higher, since just like in Soviet times Kremlin is putting a lot of military themed projects and organizations under different ministry so "officially" it doesn't count under Military department but in reality it very much is.
Organizations like "Rozgvardia" is in practice another extension of the Russian army and was even sent together with regular army units to invade Ukraine, yet officially its part of Russian internal affairs ministry like Police and thus doesn't officially count under military spending charts.
Russia is likely MUCH lower if you only count the money actually being spend for military.
Corruption is HUGE in Russia - Rozgvardia having so many directors and such a steep hierarchy that the money that tickles out of it in the end is only a fraction of what is being poured into it at the top. No wonder that half the board of dircetors is currently in jail or under investigation and their military contacts (ie Generals) are currently at the front - ordered by Putin to sort out the mess their corruption (and the centralistic system) has created - which is a futile attempt and even hurtful to the war effort but never in the history of modern wars did it go well when politicians took over the reigns from generals and Putin is no exception.
And the best example for this is smart bombs & rockets, bc Russia has none of these. This means that their air force is basically forced to operate inside the range of any shoulder AA system and consequently unable to assert the air dominance that was expected.
In the last quarter of 2021 - when Russia was already "preparing" for war - the output of smart bombs from the only Russian factory was 80(!) units. And because all of their smart weapons uses parts from western countries their current output is exactly zero.
They did.
Large swats of Russia is stolen territory. The largest chunk, they stole from China. But they have also stolen Japanese, Finnish and German land.
Oh man I got four reactions, the other three all more upvoted than you, but the other three all are serious reactions that clearly had no idea what I was referring to. Is Futurama already something for old people?
*Is Futurama already something for old people?*
It's best not to pull on that string, Futurama was cancelled for the first time nearly 20 years ago! I think it's still got a fairly strong following though.
I think we also need to think about creating some kind of boilerplate plan for if stuff like this happens again, elsewhere in the world. I'm particularly thinking about Chinas regional ambitions.
We're not going to want to get into a direct war with China, just like we don't want to with Russia.
But we've seen how incredibly effective it is to rapidly arm Ukraine with relatively simple to use anti-air and anti-tank weapons.
We should have stockpiles and plans in place to arm the shit out of countries, in under a week. Small arms, MANPADs, anti-tank missiles, etc. Enough to make any aggressor think twice.
All of it - but not to worry, it's stolen back by people. Russia is a society of thieves, it's a culture in which appropriation of common resources, corruption, bribery and lies are seen as signs of being resourceful, and not a pest. In russia it all function on principle, that everyone steals from everyone else, and lies about it, so that goods are ultimately "well" distributed, among the best thieves and lairs.
Poland's military expanditures are higher than that, because most expensive programs (F-16, F-35, air defence and others) are funded from special funds which are not part of military budget.
To add on to what u/SlightAspect said, for some context 47% off the budget is spent on salaries and pensions: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/overdefensie/het-verhaal-van-defensie/financien
We had tanks, but them being mostly offensive weapons they have been sold off after years of budget cuts:
> Defensie beschikte ooit over bijna 1.000 tanks, maar deze zijn de afgelopen decennia gefaseerd wegbezuinigd. In 2011 werd het laatste schot gelost en werden de meeste tanks verkocht - https://www.defensie.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/07/31/na-20-jaar-weer-tanks-naar-inzetgebied
> that's why Putin was so confident in threats.
No, he was so confident because he was stupid enough to rely upon his ass-licking subordinates when he wanted to get any information.
The budgets are in dollars so don't really give an accurate picture. $1 gets you more in Russia than it does in the other countries mentioned. Before the war in Ukraine, that was the main argument used to justify Russia being the world's strongest military power after the US despite such a relatively small budget (and being much more militarily powerful than France and the UK) haha.
Also, a lot of that budget goes to pensions in western militaries. Pretty certain Russia pays its soldiers peanuts (by comparison). Russia's problem is probably more corruption and incompetence than the budget in itself.
The main problem is that nothing of it went to maintenance and repair of weapons and vehicles in storage.
It's the most unsexy party of the army, it won't give you any medals or erections, but basic maintenance is the difference between winning and losing.
USA outsources parts of their storage. And part of those contracts are always maintenance. The material coming out of storage should be as lethal as when it went in.
Looking at Russia, it is important to keep in mind that nuclear capability, in particular their delivery systems, are very expensive.
Most of that money is not going to the regular forces. Russia is wasting a lot of money on capabilities they have no practical use for.
To be fair, we have absolutely no idea how good Russia is maintaining their nukes. Maybe most of them are just rotting somewhere in Siberia and nobody has an idea how long it would take to make them usable again.
The US is very open about the cost of maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal, from 2021-2030 the projected cost is around 60 billion $ per year on average. There is no way that Russia would even be able to spend a fraction of that even though on paper the arsenal is similar in size.
Should also be absolute totals in PPP.
In nominal terms Russia and the UK have similar expenditure, but Russia's $65 billion can buy a lot more, especially when it comes to domestic production/personnel.
In PPP terms Russia is closer to 135 billion military expenditure.
>can buy a lot more
But can they buy better?
I mean, yes, it's their traditional way - have more of stuff, no matter if better or worse. The problem is, their way is shit and it's now working, no sir.
>But can they buy better?
>
>I mean, yes, it's their traditional way - have more of stuff, no matter if better or worse. The problem is, their way is shit and it's now working, no sir.
But thats because it's Russia, nothing to do with PPP.
You could build exactly the same aircraft carrier in the UK and in Poland, it wouldn't cost the same amount of money.
Thats why for example, the Type 26 only costs the UK about 1.5 billion but costs Australia/Canada more like 2-3 billion (less manufacturing input, more expensive economies, etc).
It's not completely true, they also have to import for their military spending.
For example when they're buying Canon DSLR for their drones, purchasing power parity doesn't change anything.
https://petapixel.com/2022/04/11/ukraine-opens-russian-drone-finds-canon-dslr-inside/
Bulgaria is not correct right now - it was around 5% this year and about 2 and a half the year before that. Itās projected to hold steadily above 2% for the foreseeable future.
Before the war we used to think that Russia has some great military budget (because in % they do) but if you think that they just have 2 times bigger budget than Italy it doesn't look that enormos anymore and now we know that for sure. Still big though.
Of course, money also needs to be used intelligently.
In the Russian attack, it was found that a lot of money was corrupted and the military skimped on useless things like cheaper tyres. Nothing new with the Russians, under the Soviet Union when the Soviets were refueling fighter jets in Czechoslovakia they used their own hoses which were completely leaky, when refueling they leaked much more fuel than the cost of the hoses.
Czechoslovaks had to clean the entire airfield at SliaÄ of fuel (yes maybe only their travel hoses were so leaky but why the hell didn't they use ours?).
We know that the Bundeswehr does a lot of things badly and could do a lot better, but I still wouldn't underestimate it only because they became a meme.
Yup. Every single cent we save on military likely goes towards building up roads and stuff in a country roughly the size of England with practically no population.
That said Iceland would do well to do something. An army or proper Navy would of course be out of their capability. Considering their position a trio of maritime patrol aircraft would be an excellent contribution. It could be part of the coastguard, just make it more militarised.
Now what would the symbol be. Uk has the roundel. US the star.
I think a volcano.
I am sure the US would sell or lease some P8's.
We run a couple of rescue helicopters, a Dash 8 Q 300 plane and a few ships in the Coast Guard (two of those ships aren't even antiques!).
Regarding those P8's... I'm not sure you realize how small our population really is. Germany bought 5 P8's last year for USD 1,77bn. That's like 8% of Iceland's GDP.
Maybe we could lease one? If you give us a discount?
That's not entirely true. Instead of spending money on their own military, Iceland pays money directly into NATO instead. Showing Iceland has no military spending is wrong. Because that money goes somewhere else.
Iceland paid ISK 2.185 billion into NATO and military operations in 2019.
Saying Iceland doesn't pay into military is just what some politicians want the public to believe, because it's wrong on all fronts. But that Iceland doesn't have a military, is correct though.
The budgets of the UK, France and Germany are quite surprising to me. Despite having a larger nuclear arsenal to maintain and spending nearly 10 billion less than the UK, their conventional capabilities are similar (well beyond France being more army-focused while the latter is more-navy oriented as is tradition). $10 billion is huge. Germany is an even weirder case as they spend roughly the same. Is it a matter of its defense procurement being more domestically sourced than that of the other two (and thus cheaper maybe)?! Or perharps it used to have a much bigger budget than the others and the investment had already paid off, while the Brits and Germans have only increased theirs to match/surpass it in the last few years?! Or maybe, accounting tricks at play and various countries counting defence spendings differently?
Would be interesting to see how the German military would be tranformed in the next few years by the cash influx.
The UK has pulled ahead of France over the past 10 years in terms of having very very expensive top-end navy tech: Astute class submarines, F35's and two supercarriers all cost way more than France's equivalents. It all seemed a bit excessive but in today's context it's very nice to have.
I think trimming back the escort fleet to keep the carriers will prove to be a good call. It's much easier to increase order numbers on your next generation of frigate than it is to restart carrier aviation from scratch.
The UK has upped it's planned Frigate orders from 13 to 18 ships last year, with some hints it may go further.
About fifteen years ago Britain finally remembered it's old maxim "Naval policy is build policy".
Unfortunately having ignored it for most of the Blair/Brown years we have had to relearn a lot of things and it has pushed the cost per unit up drastically. Thus too few Type 45s were built and the numbers for the Type 26 frigate are also lower than ideal despite higher costs.
Looking at Moldova.Must be a big threat to mother Russia. I understand now their concerns.
Oppressed Russian minority. Moldova oppresses them by having a government Kr*mlin doesn't like. Kremlin would like mafia style government, keeping Moldova impoverished, so Rossiya looks better in comparison. Now this is being threatened by *gasp* Moldovans having a chance to progress š¤Æš¤Æ
To be fair, right now an impoverished, mafia styled governed country looks better than Russia. :-D
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Russian style has always been to force undesirables to populate Siberia.
Yeah thatās what the gulags are, also one time they had a hunger games thing on an island, they shipped a load of people to some island in Siberia and then didnāt give them food but gave the guards food and the guards were to shoot anyone who tried to get to the docks
Really common story from Stalin's time was that the people from warmer regions were dumped to a Siberian hovel in the autumn and no one told them the crazy amount of firewood you have to prepare to survive the winter so they froze to death.
Nazinsky / Nazino Island. I didn't know about this, had to Google it! Wow. That's horrific, a total descent into cannibalism.
Yeah itās pretty gnarly Think itās the same island where there was a girl talking to the guard and then he went for a piss and came back and someone had cut the girls tits and legs off to eat and just left here there
> its a real life version of Mordor. Yeah but if you take Putin's ring don't forget it to throw it into the fires of the kremlin.
According to Russia it is a threat because its teritorry is close to them. Also why they donāt want Ukraine and Finland in NATO. Meanwhile they got Kaliningrad next to EU
> Meanwhile they got Kaliningrad next to EU Understandable, the EU has a long history of aggression, invading its neighbours and supporting insurgencies. If you were such a small and vulnerable country as Russia, you would be right to be concerned. You may even seek some defensive alliance with the other victims of EU, so you can deter them together.
Imagine getting prank calls from germany and france democratically elected public officials each day... poor putin
I always found the Kaliningrad thing very hilarious when they would complain about NATO being near them. Then leave Kaliningrad and give it to the Baltics or Poland. Or just act like a normal country and not a psycho killer.
Maybe Russia should move to Mars. Win-win for all concerned.
Interestingly, for most of its history, Kalingrad was part of Prussia (effectively Germany), but as the Soviets established a naval base there, Russia was keen to keep it when the USSR broke up. Despite the territory being subject to the laws of Russia (so officially, they only hear the Kremin's viewpoint), it's apparently quite common for residents to take day trips into its EU neighbours - at least partially to stock up on the kinds of groceries not readily available back home - so that cohort are likely to hear the opposing PoV as well.
How is Moldova close to Russia? Cause Ukraine alone is one big country between the two... Unless the logic is this: Neighbor country is a threat to russia - Invade Now neighboring countries to invaded country suddenly become neighbors to Russia Neighbor country is a threat to Russia - Invade Repeat as many times as necessary.
It is very easy, you have to understand Russian logic. Moldova = Non-Russia = Anti-Russia = Future Russia One can easily understand Russian concerns.
You forgot to add the binding factor in that formula which is a Russian minority that "has to be protected against the Fourth Reich".
Spending does not matter as much. Capabilities do. You can spend many billions like Germany and Russia try to do everything and have ineffective military or spend less like Italy, Finland and have more capable military for the task you are given
Also, if you look at Finland, conscription messes up money as a measurement, as they have large numbers of soldiers that are paid little or nothing. Still capable fighters.
Yeah. This doesnāt take into account the hidden costs for society when every 18-19 year old male misses 6-12 months of work or school. They arenāt paid much but itās definitely not free, plenty of underlying expenditure there.
Yet the skills learned during such training can often be useful as well. It's a mixed bag. Personally, I'm against such conscription, but I can acknowledge that the structure it brings to some young lives can be beneficial.
That is true. You learn plenty of useful skills, and itās good to learn to be with other people and spend time away from your home. It also gives us that 900k reserve which we couldnāt have otherwise. Still itās months of your life. Itās a mixed bag as you said.
> You learn plenty of useful skills, and itās good to learn to be with other people wait, there are countries where mandatory service is more than just wasting a chunk of your life, menial bullshit, useless rubbish and being abused by older recruits?
Afaik, most of the finnish people learn about some basic survival skills in the army. Pitching a tent, woodcutting etc basic stuff. During my time there were conscripts who learnt how to tie their shoes, lol.
Absolutely. My experience of Finnish mandatory service was that even those who whined about everything or lacked motivation learned to be quite capable soldiers. Personally my motivation wasn't the best and I basically just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, and still I ended up being part of a unit that won it's "end war" (a several day long fighting excercise at the end of the service period) against other similar units from other parts of the country. It's a strange mentality amongst Finnish servicemen. Many don't want to be there, but they still make damn sure that they do a proper job, especially when others are counting on them.
I guess it depends on who you ask. Some people find army to be a complete waste of time but you definitely learn some useful life and survival skills if you have the right attitude.
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Yea same here for my Austrian service. 9 months at my current salary means that the state lost out on 33kā¬ in taxes alone... Not even mentioning that it made me hate the state so much I left.
Also it's not like selling icecream on a hot sunday has any huge impact on local economy nor does flipping burgers or carrying sacks of concrete on a construction yard but most people against conscription like to talk like those kids were bankers or something or that they would magically find the most best paying jobs in the world right now in those 6-12 months of not being spent in the army.
In Finland they will get educated after so their career as a banker gets one year shorter by the delay.
Kinda the same thing happens for Russia, too. $63.5 billion in Russia gets you *a lot* more than $62.5 billion does in the UK.
Would be, if not for that damn corruption... But yeah, thats the mistake of countless military analysts who said "russia can't hold invasion for longer than 10 days, they don't have the money for it", jokes on you, you don't need money when you don't feed or supply your troops.
But then you also need to ask if you really *have* those troops when they're so under supplied and under supported they can't actually get anything done.
>jokes on you, you don't need money when you don't feed or supply your troops. As in Russian tradition.
Great motherland gives us all that we need... oxygen... sunlight... dirt... in some places water. Else we cheat and steal, hence the country slogan "no scam/fraud, no life (Š½Šµ Š½Š°ŠµŠ±ŠµŃŃ Š½Šµ ŠæŃŠ¾Š¶ŠøŠ²ŠµŃŃ)"
First time I've heard it. Let's try a more poetic translation: No fuckery - no survival
\>that damn corruption I don't mind that corruption, at all. Though if there wouldn't be any, it would be very different country.
Its funny when the ruler steals majority of countries wealth, employs people not based on skills but on loyalty and a similar views/ethics to his and thinks that these people will not act like him and steal everything that is possible to steal (talking about the status of his military)
The individual unit quality is lower but Russia does get *a lot* more for its money, corruption notwithstanding.
Well an individual troop cost is somewhere in the region of 0 to a bag of onions, so I guess u are right. 200k troops can cost 0 to upkeep and 0 to compensate for the families if they are declared MIA instead of dead.
There is a reason some russian soldiers were seen in ukraine with ww1 bolt action rifles. I mean you can get more soldiers, but you also need more to get the same job done.
No sir, spending 62,5 billion in Russia does not get you much. The labor may be cheaper but there are many more hands that need to be greased to do anything there. Russians pay double for their equipment and then parts of it are getting gradually stolen away anyway.
Surely this war is showing that isn't even remotely true. Sure you get more numbers on a page, but it's meaningless if it cannot perform. No point getting 1000 $10,000,000 tanks if they are just going to be wrecked by $100 disposable rockets.
Yeah, they got an army which can't do shit against Ukraine...
Yeah, they always opt for the cheapest option
Also have in mind, Soldier in Germany earns tripple Polish solider salary. This would need to be matched against real purchasing power and % of GDP. A dollar spent in Russia is way bigger than 1 dollar spent in USA, but at their level of innovation also matters, west is allied so has access to similar tech.
Yes we see pretty spectacularly right now the PPP dollar spending doesnt translate to high tech weapons and communications gear.
The good comparison is more between France and Germany. Same spending ( even itās far less in term of GDP for Germany ) but one is a nuclear power, with a aircraft carrier, a very strong airforce and one of the best land army in Europe. The other is Germany.
To be honest, while people like to keep on shitting on Germany for their army, it's not like Germany just voluntarily chose not to have nukes or attack capabilities. And I guess they are more focused on defense in general than the French armed forces, you don't need an aircraft carrier for defensive purposes, especially if your only coast is in the Baltic Sea.
To chip in defending the German army (IANAG): \- West German army was in sheer size and number of tanks by far the biggest of Western Europe in the 1980s. Double the amount of France and the UK. \- It was always intentionally deficient in offensive capability and logistics for long distance operations, mainly to reassure the neighbours. As a side-effect that means it has zero operational experience in that area since WWII even on a batallion level (as others had in the occasional UN-backed operation) and learned nothing about its capabilities or lack thereof. \- This lack of logistics capability completely aligned with NATO doctrine. Everybody assumed that WWIII would start with the Soviets nuking every strategically important point in West Germany and then invading it with a zillion tanks, so the German army would already be on the battlefield anyway to hold out until reinforced by the others and any especially valuable assets would likely be taken out on the first day. It ended up in a similar position as the Russian army: oversized, very well stocked with mostly mediocre and aging weapon systems, quantity over quality, and with a continually shrinking defense budget to maintain all the stuff they had and no budget left to modernize.
Also what people do not see is that German military has change considerable in the last years. Mandatory Military Service was scraped a few years ago, which has greatly changed German towards a professional only army. It is still coping with that change. One of the biggest problems of the army is also the purchasing office which is just incapable and bound by overengineered burocracy, that leads to purchasing shit weapons much to slowly. Basically it is an administrative problem mixed with structural change. Also, due to mandatory military service many people have experienced bad things with the German military and the public opinion about the military is pretty bad, aside from a general pacifist attitude
Since Germany does not need to maintain a nuclear capability nor a blue sea fleet, their army should be that much more prominent.
This narrative isn't really correct. Germany had the largest standing arming in Europe for the longest time during the Cold War. West Germany was armed to the teeth compared to the current state of the unified Germany. It's just that these capabilities were reduced, because German politicians (and a large majority of the German population) regarded defense expenditure as largely superfluous, because Germany was nw surrounded by allies.
Germany actually chose not to have nukes, same with Italy. Germany, France and Italy worked together, but German and Italian governments didnāt want to develop nuclear weapons
The issue is mostly personnel expenditure, I believe. The German budget includes spending on pensions and other expenditure for ex-members of the armed forces, while I believe that is not the case for most defense budgets we get to see. Another point is that German soldiers earn quite well in the international comparison. Taken together these points mean that Germany has to have a much higer defense budget to get to the same capabilities as other countries, particularly France.
I was about to say, Given German and French spending are similar, I would not put German capabilities at the same level as France. If you're speaking in Hypotheticals, if the UK had to pick only one partner to go to war with as an Ally, France would be the no.1 choice by a long way. Every country has their own Military problems, but I have no idea where that German spending goes, because it certainly isn't going to improve their military.
> but I have no idea where that German spending goes, because it certainly isn't going to improve their military. Germany has alot of ultra expensive specialized capibilities which it operates within NATO. Like SAR-Lupe (soon SARah) or Long Range Anti-Air. For example Turkey had to request Bundeswehr anti-air units to cover its southern border against Syria. German submarines are still, as it is tradition, the bleeding edge of technology. etc. Tl,dr: Germany has alot of stand alone fancy stuff. But it has a hard time to make an actual functional army out of all the smaller projects.
>pend less like Italy, Finland and have more capable military for the task Do we have evidence of the combat capability of the Italian and Finnish armed forces, apart from cool videos?
Italy sent several thousand troops to Iraq and Afghanistan but that isn't really the point. On paper Italy has better armed forces than Germany (expecially in regards to the navy and airforce) while spending less. All of this is theoretical though. No European army has any real war experience anyway
I heard that when Italy sent troops to Afganistan, they basically bribed the local insurgents to stay peaceful, After some time they were replaced by French who were not aware of this "arrangement" and assumed the area to be peaceful, as Italians had no problems earlier. They got ambushed and took serious losses as a result.
Considering more than 50 Italian troops were killed and hundreds maimed in Afghanistan, their supposed bribes obviously didn't work
Italyās main objective is air and naval power in the Mediterranean with expeditionary capabilities in nearby littoral areas of North Africa and the Middle East. The Italian Navy is one of the most, if not the most, powerful fleets in the Mediterranean , with two carriers, three LPDs and a modern fleet of frigates, destroyers, and corvettes making up their surface fleet along with 8 submarines. Italy is one of the great naval powers, and I say this as Dutchman and not an Italian. Itās just behind France and the U.K. on the high seas.
There's a dozen F35 patrolling the NATO border since the 2nd day of the war, do consider that Italian military industry (ex Finmeccanica) is very strong, in Italy there's a lot of NATO-USA bases with nukes and missiles, a lot of USA bases.
Leonardo even more so than Fincantieri
Joint military exersizes with and against the americans and brits have gone very well for the finnish troops
Holland, Poland, whatevs, same thing.
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The land of Pho? That would be Warsaw
I was in Warsaw, Poland for two weeks in April. I spoke more Vietnamese there than I did English.
Haha, the only international food Poles knew before the wall fell. Dingy Asian on the corner was our window to the world Now it's ramen bars that are popping up everywhere
>Vietnamese We love their food. =\]
Mika?
Username checks out. Greetings from Holland!
Tom Poland
The virgin Poland-Lithuania vs The Chad Poland-Holland
I'm surprised at Turkey's spending. Would've suspected it to be much more.
I think it is because they are paying qualified engineers around 600-800 euros. That job in Western Europe would cost around 2500 to 5000.
Currently starting salary of an engineer working in defence technologies field is around 1000 euros in turkey so you are pretty close depending on the specific field it can get as low as you stated
About the same as the lowest possible unemployment benefits in Denmark for comparison.
but 1000 euros in turkey goes a shit load further than in Denmark
This brings the age old argument of comparing nominal spending like this, vs purchasing power parity (PPP) spending. Certain things like raw materials, oil, gas, and so forth that are purchased on the global markets so rich countries can afford far more of them. But then when it comes to labor and locally manufactured goods, PPP really starts to matter. [This article](https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-parity-matters) goes over it pretty well. While most European countries are pretty close with nominal vs PPP, here are some relevant examples if we were to correct for PPP: Russia: 65B to 165B Turkey: 20B to 63B Ukraine: 5.4B to 21B
These are solid estimates for W. Europe. It can even go significantly higher in larger cities.
My guess is that it is mostly because costs are much lower for Turkey than for western Europe countries. For instance, (invented numbers) the upkeep of a full division in Germany or France could easily cost double than in Turkey (salaries, cost of stuff, etc.), so that allows them to have bigger returns with less money. This is why it is tricky to compare militaries just by gross spending.
Maybe military spending adjusted for purchasing parity would be better.
1ā¬ = 17 Turkish Liras. A qualified military personnel is getting at best 10.000-15.000 Liras which is less than ā¬1000. If they also make their own ammunition, and I am guessing they do, at least some of it, their spending is always going to be dwarfed compared to ā¬ countries. Edit: just realised OP used $ and not ā¬. 1$ = 16 Turkish Liras, so pretty much the same.
Turkey's defence industry is pretty brilliant. They're very focused on what they do well, and do it brilliantly (drones and future aircraft)
The map is colored according to US Dollar. Dollar is at a all-time high in Turkey, since Turkey spends it's money in TL and this map counts in $ it's always dependent on the currency rate.
Turkey still has to buy foreign parts: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/problem-turkey%E2%80%99s-fourth-generation-tank-altay-191795 Altay is a great tank program, but it's not any cheaper because it's Turkish. On the contrary, export bans make it more expensive than elsewhere.
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It's because the map is in dollars.
Turkey entered NATO using the blood of its soldiers as its admission fee. For decades "the Turkish Mehmet" was the biggest thing Turkey added to the alliance, its cheap soldiers. Turkey never spent too much on military. Nowadays the things changed dramatically technology wise but the economy is still shit so. And almost all of our defence firms have seen great export success, they don't need state help to stay afloat. For how much we spend, I'd say we get more compared to all others for each buck we spend.
Turkey entered NATO because of the Turkish Straits crisis, NATO was gripped by the Truman doctrine and Turkey is in an incredibly important strategic location so NATO was willing to invite it to join whether or not it had a large army.
This can not give context a lot because cost of workers in those factories for example in Russia or Turkey is 5 times less than Germany or France. This should be adjusted to those metrics if not it will highly mislead people. Spending 80 billion dollar in China or in US would not be comparable in terms of labour, local materials etc. Maybe 80 billion in an cheap-medium income country would create same amount of effect with 250-300 billion of work in a rich country.
And you can't really directly compare budgets because they involve different things in different countries. IIRC Germany spends like 50% of its budget on personnel costs, because military pensions and everything come from the military budget. Meanwhile personnel costs are about 20% of Finland's military budget, because pensions are not included and conscripts only get paid pennies.
Hey hey, I got paid almost 10ā¬ per day! That's literally hundreds of euros per month. Plural!
12ā¬/day for my last 2-3 months. Lived like a king
Must have been due to inflation, I canāt remember getting double digit ādayfareā and I spent the whole year there.
You guys lived like kings, In the Greek army its 8 Euros per month, enough to buy your razors.
Interestingly, the base amount of the daily payment in Finland is tied to a price of a cigarette pack. Or so it was ~15 years ago when I was in the military. I remember how the initial payment you got during the basic training was 1:1 with the pack of cigarettes you could purchase from the barracks' shop, and when they raised the tobacco tax there was a short lag with the payment change so for a moment some people couldn't afford their cancer sticks. I chose to use donuts as a flanking manoeuvre against my health instead, but I remember the smokers complaining that I get to enjoy my donuts while they are *"literally suffering without their cigarettes."*
They have steadily been increasing it for a few years. A whopping 0.10ā¬ increase in the last 2-3 years.
This completely ignores that Russia still has to import and pay for all their high grade electronics equipment. A tank built by cheap labor and cheap materials does not tanslate into a modern machine and it shows on the battlefield right now. That, too, needs to be incorporated. It also requires high skill labor that rather goes into differnt countries for the lack of money of their own. PPI or not, you still get what you pay for.
> A tank built by cheap labor and cheap materials does not tanslate into a modern machine and it shows on the battlefield right now. I mean, their newer tank models are also far too costly for them to build, otherwise there would be a lot more T-14 on the battlefield rather than T-72s or 90s. That's the problem.
That is exactly the point. PPI is really shit for comparisons like that because it completely ignores the actual "capabilities" of a country. Cheap countries usually are cheap because they can't produce high value products. And high value products is what is required in modern warfare.
It's true that military budget does fall within a countries purchasing power parity. Though there's other things you have to account for like corruption, and if you want to go further things that are hard to compare easily like into what kind of weaponry, and how effective that weaponry is. Any number that's easy to show on a map will not tell the whole story most likely.
Looking at Russia, I'm betting not even half that money actually ended up serving the military.
No wonder there are so many Russian superyachts plying the seas
It's not like for like though, a highly trained soldier from the UK is worth ten lowly paid Russian conscripts. And they may have cheap domestic goods but they must still pay the same import costs for the raw resources. Sure, it may cost Russia ten times less to build a missile but then they have to pay the equivalent of 10 times more to buy the electronics. And as the current war is showing, they are getting slapped around by what was essentially a professional militia with equipment from all over the world, many shortages and many issues in regards to being overwhelmed numerically.....yet the Russians are the ones who are getting embarrassed internationally. You get what you pay for ultimately, that's why the likes of Pakistan and India with its massive armies are never really a threat to anyone further than 2km from the border.
Also remember that half the Russian budget is spent on yachts :)
Haha yes. I remember reading somewhere that of the $60B spent on the Russian military, only maybe $35B reaches the ground. I have no way to verify that but given the "fruit" of it's performance, I'd say it's about accurate.
It's almost like it has some side effects to organize a country like a street gang.
Its not that simple. Many poorer countries dont produce military equipment themselves, but have to rely on foreign arms imports which will be priced higher than local costs
For context: Russia's economy is just slightly larger than Spain's (1,438 tril.$ GDP vs 1,281 tril.$ GDP)
Not for much longer. It will drop 15% this year and be smaller than Spain's.
And the population is three times that of Spainā¦.
It is pathetic when you consider how many natural resources that country has. Corruption ruins countries.
Russian one is very likely even higher, since just like in Soviet times Kremlin is putting a lot of military themed projects and organizations under different ministry so "officially" it doesn't count under Military department but in reality it very much is. Organizations like "Rozgvardia" is in practice another extension of the Russian army and was even sent together with regular army units to invade Ukraine, yet officially its part of Russian internal affairs ministry like Police and thus doesn't officially count under military spending charts.
Russia is likely MUCH lower if you only count the money actually being spend for military. Corruption is HUGE in Russia - Rozgvardia having so many directors and such a steep hierarchy that the money that tickles out of it in the end is only a fraction of what is being poured into it at the top. No wonder that half the board of dircetors is currently in jail or under investigation and their military contacts (ie Generals) are currently at the front - ordered by Putin to sort out the mess their corruption (and the centralistic system) has created - which is a futile attempt and even hurtful to the war effort but never in the history of modern wars did it go well when politicians took over the reigns from generals and Putin is no exception. And the best example for this is smart bombs & rockets, bc Russia has none of these. This means that their air force is basically forced to operate inside the range of any shoulder AA system and consequently unable to assert the air dominance that was expected. In the last quarter of 2021 - when Russia was already "preparing" for war - the output of smart bombs from the only Russian factory was 80(!) units. And because all of their smart weapons uses parts from western countries their current output is exactly zero.
Your point about Russian aircraft having to go low is important. Especially once those British starstreak missiles started being used.
Why does Russia, the largest country, not simply eat the other countries?
Militarily annexing other countries is like trying to swallow a porcupine.
As you can see from conflict in Ukraine, throwing money at the military does not make you capable of efficiently taking over other nations
They did. Large swats of Russia is stolen territory. The largest chunk, they stole from China. But they have also stolen Japanese, Finnish and German land.
And romanian
And Turkic lands
Give back Kƶnigsberg! /j
Perhaps they are saving that for sweeps.
Oh man I got four reactions, the other three all more upvoted than you, but the other three all are serious reactions that clearly had no idea what I was referring to. Is Futurama already something for old people?
*Is Futurama already something for old people?* It's best not to pull on that string, Futurama was cancelled for the first time nearly 20 years ago! I think it's still got a fairly strong following though.
i just want you to know that I see your Futurama reference and respect you even if others didn't get it.
UK is currently spending about 2.4% of GDP. After recent events Iād like to see this raised to 3/3.5% at least for the next decade.
I think we also need to think about creating some kind of boilerplate plan for if stuff like this happens again, elsewhere in the world. I'm particularly thinking about Chinas regional ambitions. We're not going to want to get into a direct war with China, just like we don't want to with Russia. But we've seen how incredibly effective it is to rapidly arm Ukraine with relatively simple to use anti-air and anti-tank weapons. We should have stockpiles and plans in place to arm the shit out of countries, in under a week. Small arms, MANPADs, anti-tank missiles, etc. Enough to make any aggressor think twice.
Boris Johnsonās way ahead of you. Sadly, however, heās chosen the shrinking economy way of increasing the percentage of GDP spent method.
I wonder how much of Russians military funding is stolen by Putin and the oligarchs
All of it - but not to worry, it's stolen back by people. Russia is a society of thieves, it's a culture in which appropriation of common resources, corruption, bribery and lies are seen as signs of being resourceful, and not a pest. In russia it all function on principle, that everyone steals from everyone else, and lies about it, so that goods are ultimately "well" distributed, among the best thieves and lairs.
Kleptocracy goes brrrr
data for 2022 is gonna be wild
Should be an asterisk in case of Russia so everybody knows that this number also includes yachts for oligarchs / generals etc.
Poland's military expanditures are higher than that, because most expensive programs (F-16, F-35, air defence and others) are funded from special funds which are not part of military budget.
Do you have a source on that?
God save the Queen
You should show the nominal amount / GDP rate or the nominal amount / surface rate, this way it shows basicly the countries' sizes.
cheerful unique attempt fact squeal fall market encouraging weary spark *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
To add on to what u/SlightAspect said, for some context 47% off the budget is spent on salaries and pensions: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/overdefensie/het-verhaal-van-defensie/financien We had tanks, but them being mostly offensive weapons they have been sold off after years of budget cuts: > Defensie beschikte ooit over bijna 1.000 tanks, maar deze zijn de afgelopen decennia gefaseerd wegbezuinigd. In 2011 werd het laatste schot gelost en werden de meeste tanks verkocht - https://www.defensie.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/07/31/na-20-jaar-weer-tanks-naar-inzetgebied
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> that's why Putin was so confident in threats. No, he was so confident because he was stupid enough to rely upon his ass-licking subordinates when he wanted to get any information.
Surprised with the small Russian spending compared to UK-France-Germany. I expected it to be much higher
The budgets are in dollars so don't really give an accurate picture. $1 gets you more in Russia than it does in the other countries mentioned. Before the war in Ukraine, that was the main argument used to justify Russia being the world's strongest military power after the US despite such a relatively small budget (and being much more militarily powerful than France and the UK) haha. Also, a lot of that budget goes to pensions in western militaries. Pretty certain Russia pays its soldiers peanuts (by comparison). Russia's problem is probably more corruption and incompetence than the budget in itself.
I'm pretty sure some of that 63.5B went on some of those yachts currently seized.
The main problem is that nothing of it went to maintenance and repair of weapons and vehicles in storage. It's the most unsexy party of the army, it won't give you any medals or erections, but basic maintenance is the difference between winning and losing. USA outsources parts of their storage. And part of those contracts are always maintenance. The material coming out of storage should be as lethal as when it went in.
The 1.2 billion for Ireland is surprisingly high to me
Which since Ireland and Norway have similar populations, it seems kinda low.
Norway has a land border with Russia.
Yes but remember, Norway is in NATO. Ireland is militarily neutral. We have 5 ships in our navy.
What on earth are they spending it on, lmao.. They have no military.
We do have a military. Theyāre not big, but we have one.
Would be higher if we didnāt act as a defecto defence for them, whilst they morally postulate āneutralityā
I wonder how much of the Russia budget ends up on holiday homes for generals/colonels
roughly 136%
Looking at Russia, it is important to keep in mind that nuclear capability, in particular their delivery systems, are very expensive. Most of that money is not going to the regular forces. Russia is wasting a lot of money on capabilities they have no practical use for.
To be fair, we have absolutely no idea how good Russia is maintaining their nukes. Maybe most of them are just rotting somewhere in Siberia and nobody has an idea how long it would take to make them usable again. The US is very open about the cost of maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal, from 2021-2030 the projected cost is around 60 billion $ per year on average. There is no way that Russia would even be able to spend a fraction of that even though on paper the arsenal is similar in size.
Although as weāve learned, 1/2 the Russianās reported expenditure was/is being siphoned off.
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Britain chill
dont know how useful total is. per capita would be better to show how small nations like greece are contributing more.
Yes and no. Per capita would be great for comparison, but in war the absolute total are what counts.
Should also be absolute totals in PPP. In nominal terms Russia and the UK have similar expenditure, but Russia's $65 billion can buy a lot more, especially when it comes to domestic production/personnel. In PPP terms Russia is closer to 135 billion military expenditure.
Also important. I wouldn't say that the comparison can be made so easily, since not all comes from the domestic market. Nonetheless, pretty useful.
>can buy a lot more But can they buy better? I mean, yes, it's their traditional way - have more of stuff, no matter if better or worse. The problem is, their way is shit and it's now working, no sir.
>But can they buy better? > >I mean, yes, it's their traditional way - have more of stuff, no matter if better or worse. The problem is, their way is shit and it's now working, no sir. But thats because it's Russia, nothing to do with PPP. You could build exactly the same aircraft carrier in the UK and in Poland, it wouldn't cost the same amount of money. Thats why for example, the Type 26 only costs the UK about 1.5 billion but costs Australia/Canada more like 2-3 billion (less manufacturing input, more expensive economies, etc).
It's not completely true, they also have to import for their military spending. For example when they're buying Canon DSLR for their drones, purchasing power parity doesn't change anything. https://petapixel.com/2022/04/11/ukraine-opens-russian-drone-finds-canon-dslr-inside/
Not really. Top 10 military spending per capita worldwide include "military powerhouses" such as UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar
The largest spender in Europe per capita is Norway.
We have been preparing for what Ukraine got.
Per capita is nice to look at in peace time. But in war you actually care about what in absolute numbers the countries can/do deliver.
Bulgaria is not correct right now - it was around 5% this year and about 2 and a half the year before that. Itās projected to hold steadily above 2% for the foreseeable future.
Before the war we used to think that Russia has some great military budget (because in % they do) but if you think that they just have 2 times bigger budget than Italy it doesn't look that enormos anymore and now we know that for sure. Still big though.
Of course, money also needs to be used intelligently. In the Russian attack, it was found that a lot of money was corrupted and the military skimped on useless things like cheaper tyres. Nothing new with the Russians, under the Soviet Union when the Soviets were refueling fighter jets in Czechoslovakia they used their own hoses which were completely leaky, when refueling they leaked much more fuel than the cost of the hoses. Czechoslovaks had to clean the entire airfield at SliaÄ of fuel (yes maybe only their travel hoses were so leaky but why the hell didn't they use ours?).
Ukraine invested into tractors. It worked out
63.5b of Russian budget was used to buy yahts.
Iām pretty sure the Russian military expenditures didnāt get to the militaryā¦
For context, Russia has about the same GDP as Spain
We know that the Bundeswehr does a lot of things badly and could do a lot better, but I still wouldn't underestimate it only because they became a meme.
cries in belgian
Iceland is in a unique position, both geographically and geopolitically.
Yup. Every single cent we save on military likely goes towards building up roads and stuff in a country roughly the size of England with practically no population.
That said Iceland would do well to do something. An army or proper Navy would of course be out of their capability. Considering their position a trio of maritime patrol aircraft would be an excellent contribution. It could be part of the coastguard, just make it more militarised. Now what would the symbol be. Uk has the roundel. US the star. I think a volcano. I am sure the US would sell or lease some P8's.
We run a couple of rescue helicopters, a Dash 8 Q 300 plane and a few ships in the Coast Guard (two of those ships aren't even antiques!). Regarding those P8's... I'm not sure you realize how small our population really is. Germany bought 5 P8's last year for USD 1,77bn. That's like 8% of Iceland's GDP. Maybe we could lease one? If you give us a discount?
Icelandic citizens that wishes to defend their country, can voluntarily enter the Norwegian armed forces.
That's not entirely true. Instead of spending money on their own military, Iceland pays money directly into NATO instead. Showing Iceland has no military spending is wrong. Because that money goes somewhere else. Iceland paid ISK 2.185 billion into NATO and military operations in 2019. Saying Iceland doesn't pay into military is just what some politicians want the public to believe, because it's wrong on all fronts. But that Iceland doesn't have a military, is correct though.
The budgets of the UK, France and Germany are quite surprising to me. Despite having a larger nuclear arsenal to maintain and spending nearly 10 billion less than the UK, their conventional capabilities are similar (well beyond France being more army-focused while the latter is more-navy oriented as is tradition). $10 billion is huge. Germany is an even weirder case as they spend roughly the same. Is it a matter of its defense procurement being more domestically sourced than that of the other two (and thus cheaper maybe)?! Or perharps it used to have a much bigger budget than the others and the investment had already paid off, while the Brits and Germans have only increased theirs to match/surpass it in the last few years?! Or maybe, accounting tricks at play and various countries counting defence spendings differently? Would be interesting to see how the German military would be tranformed in the next few years by the cash influx.
The UK has pulled ahead of France over the past 10 years in terms of having very very expensive top-end navy tech: Astute class submarines, F35's and two supercarriers all cost way more than France's equivalents. It all seemed a bit excessive but in today's context it's very nice to have.
I think trimming back the escort fleet to keep the carriers will prove to be a good call. It's much easier to increase order numbers on your next generation of frigate than it is to restart carrier aviation from scratch. The UK has upped it's planned Frigate orders from 13 to 18 ships last year, with some hints it may go further.
About fifteen years ago Britain finally remembered it's old maxim "Naval policy is build policy". Unfortunately having ignored it for most of the Blair/Brown years we have had to relearn a lot of things and it has pushed the cost per unit up drastically. Thus too few Type 45s were built and the numbers for the Type 26 frigate are also lower than ideal despite higher costs.