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[Drunken]

People are always using the term national defence. I have started to wonder what it actually means. The usual claim is that it means defending a nation against external enemies. I can see the sense in that, getting involved in wars sucks, especially if you lose them.

The thing I am confused about is that this thing which we are currently calling national defence is not that. It can't be. I did some back of the envelope calculations and the US has spent about $30,000,000,000,000 on national defence in the last 50 years. Yes, thirty million million dollars. It sounds like a number someone made up in a comic book or something. I calculated that you could build a wall of cash around the entire US, including both coasts, alaska and a mini wall for hawaii, about 2 meters high and about a meter thick with that much money. That is around $100,000 per person.

In the last 50 years the US has been involved in dozens of wars, sometimes more than one at a time. The word 'won' is not something that can be applied to the result of many of them, usually the word 'ended' is simply used.

Most countries spend far less and are involved in far less wars. This is like me offering to build you a house for a billion dollars and then showing you a soggy cardboard box and telling you that maintenance is 1000 bucks a day. You would not get away with this in any other industry.

This has to be the most epic fail in history. The Persians at Thermopylae are laughing at the epicness of the US's strategic wastefulness. The Egyptians in the red sea are laughing at the dismal results.

I am not a US taxpayer but for anyone who is: I will offer my services as a defence force. If you can get 1000 people together and get each one to give me $100,000, I will ensure that none of those people get involved in any wars for the next 50 years. I guarantee better results than your current provider.

I also have a very nice bridge for sale if anyone is interested.

[Levi]

Is war over?

Yeah, I don't see much point in spending all that money.  You guys should use that money to pay back all that debt!

[Sergarr]

Protip: supreme uncontested military superiority on the planet helps.

[~Neri]

Protip: supreme uncontested military superiority on the planet helps.

My current Civ V game begs to differ.

My tech gap is 12 techs higher then anyone else. Happiness through the roof. High fourties.

I control most of my continent and plan on having control in about a hundred turns. Currently in war with Ghandi. He's doing really bad. Killed his army, took two of his four cities. Shelling his capital with artillery/bomberplanes and moving artillery and bombers towards his last city/to a city inrange.

Currently also flooding the seas with submarines and ships.

Military is uncontested.

Still war.

But only one at a time~

Nobody has a chance against my empire anymore.

Even if they all ganged up.

I have the planes and submarines.

They have swords and horses.

Their invasion fleets wouldn't survive very long.

Gonna kill off Ghandi before cleansing my continent of Portugal and Venice.

Then I'll invade Russia on the other continent cause Russia is the lowest in terms of tech.

Get a beachhead and swarm.

[Sergarr]

how is that "not helping"

this is literally the definition of "helping" right here

"differ" my ass

[Vilanat]

How much of it was spent internally and how much money did the US got in return, directly and indirectly? (its very hard to calculate the indirect returns)

[Baffler]

What you have to realize with the American "defense" spending, is that it is also Japanese defense spending, and providing almost every ounce of brass and steel NATO has, as well as maintaining hundreds of bases all around Europe, doing R&D, maintaining nuclear horses, keeping up NORAD and all of the associated aircraft, missile systems, and radar installations. Not to mention all of the work the army Corps of Engineers does here and abroad building things, and the horses we keep in South Korea, and...

The point is, "the war" in the Middle East isn't even close to the extent of American military operation. The US military is basically defending the entirety of the Northern Hemisphere and our allies in Europe (also Canada) know that, so their own militaries are very small by comparison.

[Sergarr]

Horses?

[mainiac]

Shit you told the Russians about the nuclear horses. 

Well at least they dont know about the nuclear cats.

[Drunken]

Protip: supreme uncontested military superiority on the planet helps.

Define 'helps'.

Involved in less wars? No.
Winning wars more often? Not really.
Sustaining less casualties in military conflicts? Less than the people the US is attacking, but more than the nations that are avoiding wars diplomatically.
Making military contractors rich? Yes, it certainly does help.

I think it is also worth asking about the phrase 'supreme uncontested military superiority'. If it is uncontested then who is the US fighting? More importantly why is the US often forced to pull out of conflicts without achieving their goals? Some Vietnamese peasants contested the supreme military superiority. Secondly why the word 'supreme'? Uncontested military superiority is pretty unambiguous. The only reason I can see to add the redundant word 'supreme' at the start is if you subconsciously have doubts that it is true and want to emphasise it to reassure yourself.

With regard to what Baffler said about US defence spending: Yes I am aware of all that. I never actually mentioned the middle east in the OP, except with respect to the historical examples of Thermopylae and Exodus. Your comment really has little to do with the question posed which was why if the US spends so much money on defence, is it involved in so many conflicts, and is defence even the right word for this given those numbers?

But since you mention the specific areas of spending I am happy to discuss them. Do you think funding the whole of NATO has increased the security of the US as a state? Do you think any increased security is commensurate with the cost of that program? You say 'The US military is basically defending the entirety of the Northern Hemisphere'... from whom? The unholy alliance of New Zealand, Namibia and Argentina and their unstoppable armies of ninja pirate zombies? I think perhaps the word 'defending' is the problem with that sentence, I would substitute it with something like 'controlling' or 'occupying'.

Let us pretend you actually believe the US is defending and protecting the world and without this expenditure everyone would be immediately crushed by the nebulous forces of darkness - What is with Sweden? Sweden is not a member of NATO, the US has no permanent military bases there, Sweden has a sane defence budget.

Shit your right! Sweden has been brutally pummeled by endless war for decades, their country is in ruins. I stand corrected.

[Tonjevic]

Nonetheless, Swedish security relies on NATO too, and their armed forces are most interoperable with western militaries. Their territory is skirted by Russian aircraft (and submarines) as if they were part of the same strategic bloc as NATO, because they are. In general the cozier strategic environment post cold war has meant military budgets everywhere are lower today than they were, which has something to do with present spending levels: Sweden's was nearer to 3% of GDP before the fall of the USSR, iirc. It is easier for nations to fall back into relying on the US/NATO security umbrella.

On supremacy: A strong military sure looks unnecessary in times of peace, but it's pretty hard to bootstrap them quickly enough when things come to a head. It certainly is hard to defend much of the waste and expense that goes into the US military machine, but that may just be down to the blessed fact that most of it never needed to be used. It's important to realise that its doctrines and technical orientation have been developed around the idea of a stand-up fight with a conventional adversary. Tanks, jet fighters, global logistics, long-range bombing of industrial centres and so on. These capabilities are not always well suited to statecraft and asymmetrical warfare with enemies that aren't necessarily distinguishable from local civilians.

The US strategic objectives in the middle east have always been a little murky to me, and whatever they have been I'm not sure they have achieved them by their interventions, but there's no arguing the point that the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were won basically in a matter of days: it has been the occupation and associated insurgencies that were the hard parts. It would have been more easily dealt with if mass murder and the complete destruction of these countries were the aims.

Stephen Pinker makes the point, by the way, that war and violence are at an all-time low. It might seem that the USA is extremely warlike, but post second world war, fewer wars entailing fewer deaths have been the norm. In my view, US global hegemony had something to do with this: proxy wars have so far proven to be much less destructive than straight-up mano-a-mano brawls between great powers.

[Jimmy]

There's a saying that pretty much sums up the ideology behind it:

"Peace through superior firepower."

[Drunken]

" In general the cozier strategic environment post cold war has meant military budgets everywhere are lower today than they were"

Except the US. It droppeed off after the fall of the Soviet Union but now it is higher than ever.

"In my view, US global hegemony had something to do with this: proxy wars have so far proven to be much less destructive than straight-up mano-a-mano brawls between great powers"

That is an easy claim to make but I don't accept the correlation between US defence spending and the decline in major wars, can you back it up at all? There are a lot of complex factors involved here and I don't accept that a less militant US would have automatically resulted in more war. North Korea could make the same claim and I would not accept that either, but since North Korea was founded global conflict has declined.

[Sheb]

I also don't see why you couldn't bootstrap an army if needed. It's pretty much what the US did in WWI and WWII.

[Tonjevic]

But how quickly? The pace of modern war is such that you need to have significant materiel and supplies to expend. It needs to have been built. Manpower alone isn't going to help given how important technology and machinery has become in deciding wars, to say nothing of logistical capacity, command structure, training, doctrine, and so on. Some of these are cheaper to maintain, quicker to develop than others, but they are all hard to realise overnight.

It's true that the USA had to shift towards more of a total war footing once they officially entered the war, but they had already been preparing men and industrial capacity for a couple of years beforehand: hundreds of thousands trained in a "peacetime" draft, and a ton of armaments shipped to the allies. Also, they had the luxury of being able to wage war outside of their own territory, such that military reverses did not threaten the home front at all.

In the modern era, the great rapidity of military advances, aided by air power, in places where opposing armies were inadequate or out of position has some bearing on this question... I would say that it is probably too late to bootstrap your military after the enemy has already crossed your border.