Posted on 08/07/2021 9:34:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The U.S. is well known for its immense military and defense spending. In 2020, the nation ranked #1 in the world in terms of military spending at $778 billion outpacing the next nine highest spenders, which came out to $703.6 billion combined.
As Visual Capitalist's Avery Koop notes, one factor is the military–industrial complex (MIC) which feeds into the U.S.’ defense dominance, with a longstanding tradition of the defense and weapons industries working closely with the U.S. government and armed forces.
So what are these billions being spent on?
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) laid out the spending plan when they made their 2020 budget proposal. It included a few main areas to invest in, including:
Air – $57.7 billion
Maritime – $34.7 billion
Ground systems – $14.6 billion
Space – $14.1 billion
Cyber – $6.9 billion
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The overall goal of the 2020 budget was to promote innovation and to strengthen competitive advantages to increase the military’s ‘readiness’ factor. Additionally, in an effort to sustain forces, a military pay raise of 3.1% was included.
Surprisingly, however, the U.S. actually does not have the largest military in the world in terms of personnel, and some of the other top 10 countries have larger or similarly sized militaries spread across different branches.
Russia is only the fourth highest spender, but they have the largest military size of any of the top 10, at around 5.9 million personnel.
All of these countries have militaries that number in the hundreds of thousands to millions, and many are a part of treaties and alliances that require them to upkeep their armies and weaponry — but none spend half as much as the U.S.
To this day, the U.S. is actively involved in a number of overseas conflicts and maintains a large military force with millions of personnel. Spending on areas such as weaponry and wages is significant in order to maintain jobs, as well as national defense.
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Now that you know that, compare US military spending versus the spending for all US entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. There’s even a pie chart that appears in the back of the 1040 tax book to show you.
No wonder people the world over are trying to get to the United States.
[[military spending at $778 billion]]
$700 billion of that going to transgender operations and hormone therapy and counseling afterwards- -
How much of the military budget goes for personnel? Compared to other large militaries, we have extensive comforts and benefits, from housing to medical care to the dependents of military members. I don’t think most large militaries go in for any of that.
The US GDP for 2020 was $21 trillion.
With that, we spent < $800 billion on our military... or 4%
The US govt spending for 2020 was ~$6 trillion.
which would make military spending ~13%
in comparison, we spent ~70% of all US govt spending on entitlements
If we stopped all adventures, we wouldn’t need to spend near as much on the military.
The USA is the #1 arms dealer in the world. Biden will increase that. I think it funny that the Left wants guns removed from US citizens, but vote in people who are willing to put automatic weapons into the hands of 3rd world warlords to kill unarmed citizens......
Social security and medicare that I paid into for over 50 years are not “entitlements”.
The problem is too much of this is spent on typical bureaucrat social welfare schemes and not enough on actual readiness to fight a war. A real war. Not another insurgent war we fight under rules designed to lose, but a real war we damn well better win.
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Make the comparison in man-hours in each country, it will look much different.
Shouldn’t that be “Person hours” now? /s
I don’t complain about how much we spend on the military, but how poorly spent it is.
There are grave strategic problems in spending $100 million per plane and $10 billion on an aircraft carrier. It makes losing any of them a disaster. We have zero acceptance of attrition in battle, and that makes a war with a peer competitor impossible to win.
US Military posture & spending is solely based on deterrence.
Unfortunately, US Political posture no longer thinks this way.
$10 Billion aircraft carriers, $15 Billion SSBNs, and $2 Billion B-2 Bombers have prevented major wars which would lead to enormous loss of life... much of it civilian life.
The wonderful benefit of nuclear weapons is that they put the politicians and arms manufacturers in the same danger as that faced by front line troops.
As Heinlein famously said, “An armed society is a polite society!”
“US Military posture & spending is solely based on deterrence.”
Sure, but we are failing in that as we seem to think the same tools that won the Cold War will work today.
Russia is laughing at our deterrence as they happily hack into our government and corporations.
China is totally unconcerned as each year they reduce our economic might and increase their own.
I’ve seen few analyses which outline that with these figures the CCP is outspending the US 2:1...
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