Posted on 05/13/2005 6:42:23 PM PDT by CHARLITE
The national defense budget could be cut by nearly a quarter and still leave the United States military in shape to take on all likely threats and fulfill its role in the war on terrorism, says Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Furthermore, the United States is outspending the rest of the world at an astounding rate. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in 2003:
Total U.S. defense expenditures were $404.9 billion, an amount exceeding the combined defense expenditures of the next 13 countries and more than double the combined defense spending of the remaining 158 countries in the world. The countries closest in defense spending to the United States were Russia at $65.2 billion and China at $55.9 billion. The United States outspent its NATO allies nearly two to one ($404.9 billion vs. $221.1 billion). The combined defense spending of the remaining “axis of evil” nations (North Korea and Iran) was about $8.5 billion, or 2 percent of U.S. defense expenditures. Although it is impossible to accurately predict future defense expenditures, Pena says the United States is on track to outspend the rest of the world combined sometime during the next 10 to 20 years.
Pena says there are no threats from nation-states that warrant the United States maintaining a large, forward-deployed military presence around the world. A better approach to maintaining U.S. security would be to eschew unnecessary interventions abroad and to reduce overseas Cold War-era military commitments.
Source: Charles Pena, “The War on Terrorism Does Not Require a Burgeoning Defense Budget,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 539, March 28, 2005.
For text:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa539.pdf
For more on Security/Defense: Arms Budget:
The difference is between being able to handle all threats and being so scary we don't have to handle most threats at all.
We need to outspend the rest of the world combined. We have no real friends when the chips are down, other than Australia and Israel.
The British as well....at least their military is very very friendly to the US, especially those who I worked with in Iraq and Qatar....
What's Mr. Pena's cost/benefit analysis on preventing a nuke from going off in an American city?
Rank Country Military expenditures - dollar figure Date of Information
1 United States $ 370,700,000,000 March 2003
2 China $ 67,490,000,000 2003 est.
3 Japan $ 45,841,000,000 2004
4 France $ 45,238,100,000 2003
5 United Kingdom $ 42,836,500,000 2003
6 Germany $ 35,063,000,000 2003
7 Italy $ 28,182,800,000 2003
8 Saudi Arabia $ 18,000,000,000 2002
9 India $ 16,970,000,000 2004
10 Korea, South $ 16,180,000,000 2004
11 Turkey $ 12,155,000,000 2003
12 Brazil $ 11,000,000,000 2004
13 Spain $ 9,906,500,000 2003
14 Canada $ 9,801,700,000 2003
15 Netherlands $ 9,408,000,000 2004
16 Israel $ 9,110,000,000 FY03
17 Taiwan $ 7,574,000,000 2003
18 Mexico $ 6,043,000,000 2004
19 Greece $ 5,890,000,000 2004
20 Sweden $ 5,729,000,000 2004
Thank you for your service.
I'd add poland in there too, although there military still needs to be built up quite a bit. But their special forces are top notch.
we have a high tech military that has things like intelligence and other stuff of that nature included in the defense budget. I would love to see what the Chinese numbers would be if they combined everything...
their military is larger and much more inefficient than ours. That generally does not lead to spending less, but more....
thank you, but I was just a contractor over there...
I worked with heroes and some very very brave people...
That list is amazing to me, a young'in in the 80's. Where's the Soviet Union? Heh.. Just amazing.
Maybe that's because we have the burden of defending the entire dang world.
Hmmm; just a contractor, so we know you were in no danger, right?
Thank you for your courage. We need people like you over there, too, and a lot of people working there have also sacrificed their lives.
Taking that into consideration would likely cut down the difference in spending on pure weapons systems significantly, although there is no doubt we would still lead the pack considerably.
Just something to consider.
As an example, in terms of naval hardware (major combatant ships), over the last ten years the Red Chinese have produced 84 major new combatants in 14 new modern classes while we have produced 55 major new combatants in 6 new modern classes of ships.
Now I believe our 55 are more than a match for their 84...but the point is that over time, that gap will continue to reduce to the point where the outcome is less certain (particularly in litoral areas close to their shores) if we are not vigilant.
Sweden spends $5.7 billion on defense? I wonder what they spend it on?
Actually there are many factories producing civilian products run by the People's Liberation Army; many Chinese generals are devoid of military ability and are essentially corrupt gangsters/industrial managers.
Please list these, I suspect you're including tiny patrol craft.
i did some calculations based on the CIA website, and its actually more than the next 14 nations combined.
also, the entire rest of the world spends $510.55 billion, while we spend $370.70 billion.
not too shabby. 72% of the rest of the world, or 42% overall.
We went down. Last year it was the next 15 countries.
yeah....mostly there was a medium amount of danger. you could never tell where the rockets were going and after July of 2004, I didnt have to go to differnt locations in the country anymore....
I did have a rocket hit within 60 feet of me. Thankfully the trailer my roommate and I were in was shielded from the shrapnel.....another hit about 50 yards from me....
"We need to outspend the rest of the world combined. We have no real friends when the chips are down, other than Australia and Israel"
Exactly - and we can't even expect that either of those two countries (or the UK) will be politically ready and willing to go to war in any particular situation.
Other factors that both liberals and libertarians calling for major defense cuts don't usually take into account: (1) We have to be able to project massive, decisive force anywhere in the world, and quickly, while China or the Islamists only need to be able to make trouble for us close to their shores; (2) I suspect the PRC's real, effective military spending is much higher than the 'official' total - people don't seem to remember that a large portion of their economy is still dominated by PLA-based companies and there are probably lots and lots of military-related activities that can't get measured easily in the west; (3) similarly, countries like the PRC and the Islamists don't have to pay remotely close to our salaries, so their effective 'human' force per billion dollars will be much greater than it may seem (thought fortunately we still dominate in technologies and weaponry, and we need to keep it that way); (4) we have to do a large share of all the R&D done in the west needed to stay ahead of threats from the PRC, etc. and then idiot politicians like Clinton and Chirac will work to leak our technologies to our enemies.
One can always debate what the appropriate level of military and R&D spending is, but the focus should be on military units, capabilities, and weapons programs that are needed for our posture in the world, not on trying to hack away at the DOD budget just because it is much larger than others.....
There is value in certain nation states seeing U.S. Forces up close and personal. It's another facet of deterrence that shouldn't be discounted just because the Soviet juggernaut has fractured.
Swedes have quite a lot of fairly advanced weaponry.
(U.S. military outspends next 13 nations combined)
=CIA Aircraft Kills Terrorist (Drone Obliterates al-Libbi's replacement for Al-Qaeda)
SS. Keep spending!
Remember a great deal of PLA spending is on non-projectable land forces that would never see combat against the US unless we invaded mainland China, which we're not going to do.
Japan is the only surprise to me on that list - I had no idea, 'cause I still think of them as limited to a tiny self-defense force.... I'll have to look up what kinds of weapons and units they're fielding these days....
.... but where's RUSSIA??? The article puts them at $65 billion....
satellites? and probably some heavy duty defense on their west coast
I have heard that the French and German militaries are operated in large part as quasi-welfare institutions with a very high ratio of middle-aged beaurocrats. Not sure where I saw the reference to this. But France as the #4 military spender in the world means they must be counting smelly cheese as weapon systems.
Yeah, it's really sort of interesting how Japan built one of the top militaries in the world and basically nobody noticed, because of the belief that they don't have a military because of their constitution. They basically got around that through semantics ("Naval Self-Defense Force" instead of "Navy" etc.)
One factor is unlike the PRC there isn't some panicky article written by some incompetent goofball at WingNutDaily about some new Japanese superweapon posted every day on FR, like there is for PRC weaponry.
The Japanese Navy and Air Force are currently superior to that of the PRC in my estimation and they'd win any sort of air/sea battle. They've got AEGIS destroyers, F-15s, and a greatly superior standard of training and tradition, particularly at sea, than the PRC. Their weakness is, of course, no nukes, but that could be rectified in months whenever they felt like it, and a weakness in deep strike capability.
In the last ten years, Red China has accomplished the following (* indicates a new class):
14 DDG's (2-Luhu*, 1-Luhai*, 4-Hangzhou* (+2 more coming), 2-Lanzhou*, 2 Gungzhou*, 1-new unamed Type 51C*)
16 FFG's (2-Ma'anshan*, 10-Jiangwei II*, 4-Jiangwei*)
31 SS's 2-Yuan*, 8-Kilos* (plus 4 more coming), 7-Song*, 10-Ming)
23 Major Amphips (3-Improved Yuting*, 10-Yuting*, 10-Yuhai)
That's 84 in 14 classes.
I can provide our own numbers in the same fashion. All of this is courtesy of US Navy Fact Files, Sinodefense, AS, GlobalSecurity, and other sites, as well as the US Navy Institute to which I belong.
Their new nuclear carrier was and contiunes to be very expensive. I believe they are building a second.
The Japanese Navy is arguably, next to the US navy, the best destroyer navy in the world.
Good point - but I still don't share the author's "Oh, no, look how much more we're spending...." point of view when it comes to the military. I know there's plenty of lard in any DOD budget, but the author is talking about dramatically scaling back US forces and capabilities, not merely being more efficient in what we do. I'm all for striving to be more efficient and effective, but I'm not for saying we don't need to be able to be the biggest baddest force around, anywhere anytime. Leaving a power vacuum anywhere in the world will just risk more situations like the 1930s....
Defending the Bikini Team from errant males.
Yup, I haven't looked up the numbers recently, but both France and Germany have huge salary and pension commitments that eat up an extraordinary proportion of what gets listed as their 'military' budget.... of course, we have a lot of that too, but I've read some things to suggest that those two countries don't have a whole lot of capability left over after they pay for all their human and overhead costs....
Japan is #3? I thought we provided their defense. I would have never guessed. I thought they had something in their post-war constitution limiting their military size.
The Japanese economy is so huge that even going a bit above 1% of GDP in spending gives them a huge military budget.
Oh, while I love Cato in general their defense positions are silly.
On the other hand, for whatever reason people are big on "sky is falling" analysis of our military relative to others, particularly the PRC.
If we do not, I believe we will fight them in the next ten years or maybe sooner depending on the Taiwan issue. I believe we will win in any case, but that the cost will be much greater than if we act accordingly now. Just my opinion.
Art deco furniture, pickled herring, and akvavit?
;-D
re: Japan
Looks like they have some rather useful forces to have around, so close to the PRC.... :^)
Even if they weren't directly involved in a particular confrontation, the PRC's leaders would have to keep thinking about what Japan MIGHT do in conjunction with the USA.....
220+ F-15s
56 destroyers and destroyer-escorts of various types
18 submarines
Of course much depends upon specifics of training and quality of individual weapons systems, etc. but it sounds like it could at least help to make the PRC pause before whooping things up too much with us....
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/japan/ship.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/japan/f-15j.htm
I heard the average age of a Belgian soldier was 40.
> I have heard that the French and German militaries are
> operated in large part as quasi-welfare institutions ...
When has it ever been otherwise with the French?
(except while they are actively engaged in losing a war :-)
We have now surpassed the Macedonian Phalanxes, the Roman Legions, the Mongol Horde, the Moorish Tide, and the British Navy in both absolute AND relative military supremacy. This is truly a unique point in all of human history.
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