Streamline the U.S. Military Budget

I'm not even convinced civilisation would be gone.

Madagascar always survives.. Fucking assholes...

One free internet to anyone who can point out the reference!

That would be bioweapons, of course.

Pandemic 2 is a pretty cool game.

One free internet to Radix, who came out of nowhere to retrieve said internet.

Civilization might not be gone, but I doubt we'd enjoy the new form it would take on. Martial law, food riots, general collapse of the social order as we know it, the works.

...so basically like third world countries, but everywhere.

I'd kind of enjoy helping start anew.

Probably get my unit together and start a commune, working as protection to a community against all the chaos outside of it.

But that's waaaay off-topic, potentially an interesting thread idea though.

Right, but most of us would be content to NOT have to rebuild everything from the ground up. Especially since I have no desire to babysit the assholes around me so they dont kill eachother.

Just for a little crazy on topic discussion... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

• DOD spending $721.3 billion Base budget + "Overseas Contingency Operations"
• FBI counter-terrorism $2.7 billion At least one-third FBI budget.
• International Affairs $10.1–$54.2 billion At minimum, foreign arms sales. At most, entire State budget
• Energy Department, defense-related $20.9 billion
• Veterans Affairs $66.2 billion
• Homeland Security $54.7 billion
• NASA, satellites $3.4–$8.5 billion Between 20% and 50% of NASA's total budget
• Veterans pensions $58.4 billion
• Other defense-related mandatory spending $7.5 billion
• Interest on debt incurred in past wars $114.8–$454.2 billion

Total Spending $1.060–$1.449 trillion

Now to put it lightly your actual base budget of the military is around 663 billion USD, at 4.3% of GDP according to SIPRI. Which is between 50-60% of the total military spending depending on how you cut it. Ending the war operations (including use of mercenaries when US troops have pulled out) will save you around 100 billion a year. The Weapons Acquisition is part of the base budget, which is around 200 billion dollars (which I think you can probably cut in half). If you let soldiers purchase choose between customised equipment and standardised equipment I actually doubt the basic troop costs would increase because

• Allow arms purchases from any country and stop favouring US companies. An arms industry in America is not a healthy or useful one
• The actual cost of most weapons is 10x lower than what America pays for most of them

For instance, if you purchase from Pakistan (our bestest ally), m-16s cost like $250 (made by child labour too!). I can see America might want to limit the bigger hardware purchases (such as fighterjets) to only allied countries but I think it is pointless to continue the arms race against the nobody-enemy. The United States was the most powerful country because in the past it focused on developing a great economy and producing brilliant people, and when they didn't have them, they grabbed them from the rest of the world (like Einstein or other scientists).

The solution to having a better military is exactly the one that China is taking right now. Zero increase in GDP-spending ratio and instead focus on expanding the economy. USA can scream all day until it is blue in the face that China is "increasing military spending", when all they've actually done is improve their economy and the military got stronger as a side effect.

With these four actions, you can instantly save yourself 250 billion tax dollars.

• Cut foreign arms aid (up to 50 billion)
• Cut R&D in half (just start dropping useless projects like you were Steve Jobs) (up to 100 billion)
• End US-only arms purchasing policy (basically a big ass subsidy to American arms corporations) (I'm not sure)
• Pull out of any offensive wars (up to 100 billion) (Also if you deploy via UN, USA would only pay around 20-30% of the cost, it'd be mostly funded by Japan)

edited 20th Feb '11 9:20:11 AM by breadloaf

We should just use all of our war savvy to sell all of our weapons to everybody, provided we can turn a quality profit.

Just become the arms dealers of the world.. Funding for R&D will come back, lots of good technology for everything else will be a side affect, as such things tend to.. And we make the greenbacks.

Except maybe those railguns and lasers, we're gonna keep those sumbitches and not let anyone else get anywhere close to those.

I mean shit guys, lets be honest, the only real export the US has anymore is war and weapons, might as well take advantage of one of them to stay relevant.

^ Well my primary argument against that is, America's military corporations are heavily subsidized and I don't think they would be anywhere near as relevant if they were not. They receive at least (from what I can tell in the US military budget) around 150 billion dollars that is just fun money. They don't even do anything to deserve it (like straight up arms purchases by the US government to give to other countries).

We can effect foreign policy by buying weapons as much as by selling them. I've heard arguments that we could drain the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan by going to their weapons suppliers and buying up their stock at prices the Taliban couldn't afford, at a lower cost than we're incurring trying to put down the insurgency by heavy-handed means. I'm not sure if the math pans out though.

^

I'm more talking about them making an actual profit manufacturing for other countries, in addition to what we already do.

The problem with that idea is that American weapons suck wind. Just for an example, look at our two newest air superiority platforms—the Raptor and JSF—compared to something roughly equivalent like the Typhoon. The Typhoon was a disastrously corrupt and overbudgeted project by English standards, yet it still amounted to a fraction of the Raptor's development, and individual jets are also far cheaper while performing perfectly well against them in wargames. The JSF, meanwhile has ballooned to previously inconceivable heights of graft and incompetence, teetering on cancellation after countless years in development with absolutely ridiculous unit costs.

I don't know what, but something's got to be done about our defense industry before it would be truly competitive.

^ Something being expensive compared to a cheaper alternative does not equate to it sucking.

That said the F-35's ballooning costs is unfortunate. And whether or not it's worth canceling and use older proven aircraft or just finish it all the way is a debate by itself.

Well the Canadian government is in total denial about the F-35. It doesn't even have the range to patrol Canadian air space but they're going to single-source contract the fighter jets from Lockheed Martin (not that it matters, since nobody else can make it anyway) at costs that are basically ballooning before we even signed the contract. It's already estimated to be double the unit cost (going upwards to 200 million per unit with maintenance) with zero of the capabilities we need and the Chinese Su-27 flanker can potentially down it 1 on 1, and in the worst case scenario it is 4-1 (but at a unit cost of 27 million each, it basically can just swarm down the planes at like 8-1 anyway).

But if you get the same value fora much larger price, you're clearly wasting money.