Worst part is even though it probably is the best military by a good margin, it’s not very good at all if you look at this stat. It should be way better. These 10 countries combined would easily roll America. Although there will be no one left to enjoy the win afterwards
Oh, you didnt develop your reading skills yet. Let me rephrase it ‘If we remove nukes from the equation im not sure if they would be capable to win against usa’
Even more, Russia is doing badly in ukraine, China is a wildcard, India has like russian weapons right? They dont fair well. European countries are well prepared with high training and high tech, but probably lack resources and manpower.
Oh, you didn’t develop the part of your brain that dampens arrogance. You wrote:
without nukes I’m not so sure that would be the case.
This could easily be interpreted by someone on the internet reading some words from a random stranger as meaning without nukes (implying the 10 countries don’t have nukes or in the event of war nukes are off the table because of the mutually assured self destruction ), I’m not so sure.
People can’t read your mind. If you can’t form a sentence that rules out the possibility of it being interpreted in multiple ways, especially knowing people on the internet say dumb shit all the time, you are the one that needs to develop your writing abilities. Either that or don’t be a massive douche when someone interprets your reply incorrectly. You’re not perfect. You’ve just proved that on multiple fronts. Wake up to yourself and stop turning everything into a superiority contest.
It can project power on multiple fronts in a way that no other country can match. The US has logistics capabilities that allow it to reach the other side of the globe. But you have a point. A critical strength of the US is its network of allies, a fact not always appreciated by isolationist Americans.
Yes it can do that compared to an other country. Multiple counties could probably attack on multiple fronts in a similar way the US could if not more.
Disclaimer: know nothing. Just some unemployed neckbeard in his mid 40’s trolling with Cheeto dust fingers in between rounds of WOW in his divorced mothers mouldy basement
Well, it kind of depends on how you’re measuring. Are they attacking the US on the homeland without the aid of Canada or Mexico? In that case the terrain around the US is going to be a death trap. Any troops will land on hostile shores and quickly be mired in various mountain ranges.
But ultimately I’m not sure if it’s really that interesting of a question, outside of a “what if?” scenario. Armed forces exist in the same world as diplomacy, and the US is on good terms with many of the top ten. The big hope is that there can be military alliances that are one sided enough in size that no one wants to test the water.
I don’t think you quite understand or appreciate the sheer technological advantage the American military has, let alone volume. it’s not even close bro they could probably take on and defeat all of the top 10 nations even ignoring nukes
It’s all good. You’re not the first person that’s happened to, so I wonder if your Lemmy client can introduce a UI guide to show what comment is being replied to.
BTW: The reason we don’t have socialized Healthcare is because certain party blocks it, not because we can’t afford it. If we had a single payer we would actually be spending overall less on Healthcare not more.
It’s not just the red team blocking it. The ACA was written by insurance companies. If the Dems actually wanted to push through single payer, they would be able to each time they have controlled Congress and the pres. Don’t get me wrong, red team has never been for it and are much more to blame, but the Dems carry it as well.
I mean…yeah? They’re a big tent party, they had to compromise within their ranks to get it passed, and even with a super majority, some Dem senators are more centrist than others.
The Democrats are not a leftist party, they never have been. They’re a collection of people who aren’t conservative. But that’s the best we can get until the county’s population stops being centrist and starts voting more left.
It’s always weird watching people protect Dems as if it’s a party of uniform desires. At least half of them in office agree more with Republicans than they do with the progressive members of the same party.
Of course, spending doesn’t actually directly translate into being able to make decent weapons. Since US relies on a privately owned military industrial complex it runs into the problem of perverse incentives. Companies want to siphon as much public money as they can from the government, and that means making expensive weapons that take a long time to produce and have high maintenance costs. This ensures you have low input costs because you’re not producing much, and that you’re able to keep sucking money out of the system for the few items you do produce. To put this into perspective, it costs ten times as much to produce an artillery shell in US than in Russia, and US is still unable to ramp up its production after a year and a half of war to match Russia.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is famous for its corruption having failed audits for 6 years in a row and is unable to account for $3.8 trillion in military assets.
All of this results in an incredibly expensive and inefficient system that isn’t actually able to produce basic things like artillery shells in large quantities. US military industrial complex is good at doing what it was designed to do, which is to divert taxes from things they’re meant for such as social services and infrastructure into the pockets of the oligarchs who own the war industry.
Yes, the US is bad, we can all agree on that. It is not a forgivable thing in a democratic country to have such an out of control oligarchy.
That said, why would the US or NATO want to ramp up production?
Look at how Russia in 2010. A major player as it had insane weapon stockpiles, nuclear capabilities and weakened but still strong alliances in Eastern Europe in Ukraine and Belarus. It had the EU by the balls through gas shipments. NATO was an irrelevant relic.
How does it look like now? It lost Ukraine as an ally, Belarus is not being helpful either. It is spending a significant portion of its weapon stockpiles on destroying a country that was one of its closest allies, while making money for the US. Every house destroyed is a contract for Blackrock, every fighter shot down is a new sale for Lockheed.
The war in Ukraine is grinding down Russia from being a major power, while the US is making bank off of it. It’s just going “Aw shucks we aren’t able to supply enough munitions to kick out Russia and stop this racket, guess you’ll need to knock out a few thousand more tanks!”
What I’m saying is that neither US nor EU are capable of ramping up production. Despite all the talk over the past year and a half, no serious ramp up in production has been seen. Meanwhile, Europe is now going into a recession and spending increasingly more money on the military is going to require more austerity which will in turn keep driving civil unrest.
Also, not sure what universe you live in where Russia is being ground down from a major power buddy. Russian economy is currently booming even according to western sources, Russian industrial production is at six year high, and Russian global trade is as big as it’s ever been. If you think Russia came out of this worse than the west then you really need to stop guzzling propaganda.
On the other hand, I doubt China is spending $14,000 on one toilet seat, so the bloated US military budget probably doesn’t even convert to proportionate fighting capabilities. For example, all that money and the US can’t even manufacture enough artillery shells to keep Ukraine going against Russia and it’s tiny sliver of expenditure on that chart.
Russia, China, and Iran (the last of which isn’t even on that image) have hypersonic missiles, which effectively mean that aircraft carriers are now pre-sunk artificial coral reefs in a direct conflict with those countries. America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.
I don’t think they’ve been proven in any real sense to satisfactorily bypass the insane defences those carriers have. They’re boasted as sorta wunderwaffen at this point lol
America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.
I don’t know how big of a priority it is for them, considering the situation Russia, China and Iran have with aircraft carriers
Well, how many aircraft carriers did the US lose so far? I mean Russia just lost a shitton of military equipment fighting one of its former allies while the US made bank by rearming half of Europe, there must be an equivalent response from Russia then, if they are capable of it, right?
In 2022 the US spent an equivalent amount on Medicare as it did on defense ($747 billion vs $751 billion), and another $592 billion on Medicaid. US defense spending represents only 3% of GDP, and about 14% of the total federal budget.
The largest budget item is Social Security at $1.2 trillion.
Social program spending in the US massively outstrips military spending.
So sincere question: why the fuck is it so god damn awful over there then? People going bankrupt over medical bills isn’t a thing in Europe, and your social care appears non existent…why the dissonance between expenditure and apparent results?
Surprisingly, if healthcare is governed by the profit motive instead of an actual duty of care towards people, then the people in charge of healthcare will focus more on making profits than on providing care.
Never you fear, the disparity between America and Europe will go down. Not because America will improve - god no, it’ll get worse, even - but because the capitalists, backed by fascists, are here to loot European countries and rip the wiring out of the walls as the profitability crisis continues.
because the capitalists, backed by fascists, are here to loot European countries and rip the wiring out of the walls as the profitability crisis continues
Healthcare-wise this is already well under way, at least in France and the UK.
When we say military spending, what it really means is: how much is the US government granting the military industrial complex for them to accept powering its military
When we say Medicaid (and others) spending, it is: how much is the US gov giving to medical insurance companies to allow a sunset of poor people to have some healthcare?
Those companies are intentionally setting outrageous prices and the US is happy to pay them.
This is disingenuous, there is legislation in place that prevents the government from negotiating the price of medicine, keeping it wildly inflated compared to other countries. The US effectively isn’t doing social spending with that margin* but just laundering money to health insurance companies, medicine manufacturers, and patent barons.
*3 to 10 times the cost you see in other countries is the common range, I think, though in individual cases it gets much higher and there are some ~1:1 prices.
Probably complicates things. If we’re taking into account the cheapness of Chinese tanks, maybe we need to evaluate the strength of American tanks and equipment vs Chinese equipment.
??? Infantry in Ukraine are able to easily take out tanks if they don’t come properly supported thanks to our anti tank munitions. This is something Russia didn’t anticipate or else they wanted have gotten so many tanks destroyed. That’s such a huge impact. Also, we haven’t even provided our newest planes to Ukraine, and still Ukraine pushed Russia back quite a bit. This war has shown how big of a difference US equipment is vs Russian.
Not really, wages make up a large portion of military expenditure and I don’t think there are major differences between the individual “strength” of a soldier/engineer/whatever.
Realistically our military protects the world against going anti American. We keep every nation in the world wrapped into our economy except for those we specifically kicked out like Cuba. It’s why even nations like Russia and China are so tightly wrapped in our economy that sanctions hurt them. America is the protectors of the world, by force.
Please give me a list of enough threats the US protected Europe from to back your statement. I doubt there are enough to justify those differences, and hence your statement must be doubted until you prove otherwise.
So can you answer the question? Has there been a threat or Russian aggression into Western Europe that was averted due to US involvement? I am yet to see that.
Is your argument not good enough on its own, that you have to engage in personal attacks? No I am not dense. Please keep these comments to yourself. If you can’t engage in a civil discussion, I will report you to moderators.
Do you not understand the concept of deterrence
I do understand it. Now I’d love to see a proof of the presence of a threat that was deterred due to US military budget.
Do you believe for one second that Putin stops with Ukraine if NATO and the US weren’t standing in his way?
I need to see proof to believe that Russia is a threat to the parts of Europe you speak of, and said threat was deterred by US military budget. Otherwise I will continue not believing it.
I want to see evidence of a real threat, with evidence that it was going to happen, but was only avoided due to said deterrence. I believe that would be the textbook definition of deterrence. Anything else is not. But I am open minded if you have an alternate definition that is reasonable.
How many historical examples of this can you come up with, across the world? I’m currently thinking that’s an unreasonable set of requirements.
In my books, having the big gun in the room is deterrence. You don’t need for someone to attempt shit for it to count as deterrence - if nobody is stupid enough to try anything at all you have successfully deterred others.
If they are so good at protecting Europe, why don’t they protect Ukraine, instead of fueling the profits of the military industrial complex? Why do they keep letting hostilities and murder happen? Sounds like they aren’t deterring threats very well.
Ukraine war proves you wrong. When the threat is real, they do not deter it.
This isn’t to mention that Finland has not faced the same circumstances of Ukraine that led up to the war there, which goes back to my feafmongering claim.
But again, if you think Finland is under the same threat as Ukraine (it’s not), the US has failed to protect it. But they have successfully made a lot of profit for military corporations.
They tried to join NATO and they didn’t let them. There was a real threat and they chose not to deter it.
Finland wasn’t under any threat and was allowed to join, around the same time. The country that actually had a known threat wasn’t allowed to join. So they clearly haven’t deterred anything.
When was that? I don’t see when they were denied membership. They wanted into a partnership program that would’ve made them a member, Russian minded president shelved that idea, it was raised again when Russia annexed Crimea and it’s still ongoing.
“At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, the Allies agreed that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO in future.”
“At NATO’s 2023 Vilnius summit it was decided that Ukraine would no longer be required to participate in a Membership Action Plan before joining the alliance.”
Though IIRC you can’t join during an active conflict. That’s sorta the thing, you need to be a member beforehand to reap the benefits. When it happens, then it’s too late. That’s why after Russian attack into Ukraine, Finland and Sweden got such a hurry about it.
Maybe so. However I am not attached to my feelings and definitely open to changing my mind. I just do not see sufficient evidence that Finland was under a threat that was only deterred by US military spending.
I’m not sure if you meant that it was denied or just that it hasn’t become a member (yet). First one isn’t true but second one is. The process is ongoing and they’ll fairly likely become a member at some point, like mentioned.
I just do not see sufficient evidence that Finland was under a threat that was only deterred by US military spending.
We were close to NATO for a long time but felt that actual war in Europe and Russia attacking was too unlikely for us to actually join. Russia had to come and dispel that fantasy.
NATO isn’t supposed to be the only thing preventing it but it sure does bring us security that it won’t happen and if it in some unthinkable scenario did, we wouldn’t be left alone to fight it.
Looking at Russia and how they’ve generally treated their neighbors, saying that NATO has saved Eastern Europeans from trouble is a fairly believable argument IMO. Just look at those who didn’t join and what has happened with them. But of course it’s what ifs.
If they are so good at protecting Europe, why don’t they protect Ukraine
Goalposts moved - initial claim was that the US defense budget protects european countries, not all European countries. If that was the case, even Russia would be included as needing American protection.
I agree, the other commenters moved goalposts. My initial question asked for proof of a threat averted by US military spending. You (not you specifically, whoever is up the comment chain I didn’t check) said Finland. I said that is not a valid example, as there’s no threat. Then you said well there’s a threat, because Ukraine.
The logic doesn’t follow, because if Finland is under the same threat as Ukraine, then why is it that only Finland was protected and not Ukraine? Both wanted to join NATO, but only one actually did. Conveniently the one that isn’t under the threat… But the one that is was not protected.
In the end, we go back to my initial question: can any of you show me a threat to Europe that was averted by the US military spending? I am yet to see it. Your example of Ukraine proves it even more wrong.
The logic doesn’t follow, because if Finland is under the same threat as Ukraine, then why is it that only Finland was protected and not Ukraine?
Are you implying that two different countries facing the same threat should be treated exactly the same?
Both wanted to join NATO, but only one actually did. Conveniently the one that isn’t under the threat… But the one that is was not protected.
Again. You have proposed a catch-22. You are only accepting a valid joining of NATO if a country is undergoing conflict, however NATO does not accept nations that are currently undergoing conflict. Surely you understand that is essentially a declaration of war for all members against the other party.
In the end, we go back to my initial question: can any of you show me a threat to Europe that was averted by the US military spending? I am yet to see it. Your example of Ukraine proves it even more wrong.
I am still waiting for you to provide some historical examples that show how feasible it is for you to require examples of things that were prevented by deterrence. By definition deterrence inhibits behavior. You will not see inhibited behavior, because it is…inhibited.
Once a country is involved in a conflict, they cannot join NATO. You are proposing a logical catch 22 in which countries that join NATO only do so out of fear mongering (in your opinion), and countries that actually are involved in conflicts cannot join NATO, and thus will not be protected by the US. Finally, NATO countries aren’t being attacked, so unless you recognize the value of deterrence, there will never really be a chance to provide examples that fit into the framework you’ve set up.
I hope you do recognize the value of deterrence, and I also hope you recognize someone can’t provide examples of things that were prevented due to deterrence, since they never happened.
The threat of Russian involvement in Ukraine was known wayyyy ahead of the invasion actually occurring. Ukraine tried hard to join NATO to “deter” it but they never allowed it. So yeah, they don’t deter shit.
If Russia had plans to invade Finland like they did Ukraine, we don’t know if that would have gotten them into NATO.
I’m not saying we don’t waste money on defense, and obviously a country with zero threats on its borders can afford to spend less on defense and more on health care, but this chart in particular is a bad way to convey this message
I’m not saying we don’t waste money on defense, and obviously a country with zero threats on its borders can afford to spend less on defense and more on health care,
Don’t we spend way more on health care than military? I read somewhere it is like 4 trillion per year over 4 times more than military. Honestly as sad as this sounds I don’t think an extra trillion would improve the health care system in the US. Personally I think we have plenty of money going to health care, it is just doesn’t seem to be going towards actually healing people.
Don’t we spend more because the industry is extremely inflated? But yeah if it’s something everyone needs it should be subsidized and provided as a public service
1812 if I remember my history was in large part because they wanted to genocide all the natives and the British wanted to establish a nation for the natives (not out of altruism native trade was one of the only things that ever actually made money out of the Americas)
I support a cap at twice a much as our nearest competitor. I believe the US is one of the safest countries in the world (regarding a direct attack on our land) due to our geographical location in the world and the fact that we have more guns than people.
I’m not sure that guarding against attacks overseas, makes us safer. I think we breed a lot of adversaries by pushing our weight around all over the world. Then we get terrorist attacks which the military doesn’t really have much control over.
I’m for a strong military but I think we overshot the mark a bit.
Largest airforce in the world: US airforce. Second largest airforce in the world: US Navy. Third largest airforce in the world: US army.
A great chunk of this money should be spent on healthcare, education and infrastructure. Instead, politicians have successfully managed to deceive common taxpayer for decades.
Not saying it’s right or worth the disproportionate investment, but the true value is the threat they pose keeps other countries in line (to a degree), winning the battle before it starts.
If you win a conflict decisively, then the conflict is over and weapon sales dry up. Continuous, low-level, indecisive battles are what keep the weapon dealers in business.
I’d argue that the additional funding has allowed the US to leverage the investments they’ve previously paid for in their regular budget to help Ukraine.
You cannot throw the money congress has budgeted for Ukraine at a vacuum to get nearly as much support - you need the logistics of a ready to go military industrial complex that everyone loves to hate.
Aid given to Ukraine has mainly been material the US already has. We aren’t building new weapons for them. The dollars on the aid packages is the value of the equipment.
It’s still not enough! Until every red-blooded American has a big red button in their home that launches 10.000 nukes at random coordinates, it won’t be enough!
It doesn’t work that way, each country spends it for themselves, NATO allows to combine the defense force.
The reason US spends so much is to maintain its status of super power and to allow us to live without having wars on its territory. For example what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022 is sobering experience that if you are militarily weak others will exploit the situation.
A lot of things that we are assuming are normal are possible because of it. For example. US naval force for example allowed to protect international waters allowing for global trade.
In 2006, NATO Defence Ministers agreed to commit a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to defence spending to continue to ensure the Alliance’s military readiness.
Nah, even if they did their NATO % contribution the amount would be pitifully small. When you look at most of the articles that talk about “10 Best Places to Live” it’s mostly super small population, low immigration, countries with virtually no military.
Most NATO countries are between 1-2.5% of their GDP, but that’s only ~$300 billion. The US does ~3.5% which amounts to ~$811 billion.
The other NATO countries wouldn’t just need to meet their NATO 2%, they’d need to more than triple it. Even just for the US to come down to 2% would cause a ~$348 billion decrease (more than the rest of NATO combined).
If I were a European country free riding in NATO the last thing I’d be pushing is the US to reduce military spending.
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