Yes, but we're only spending 6% of the overall national budget. You're missing the point. These numbers mean that you can do this shit 16x over, globally while operating at-cost. We could have 16 different Russia-Ukraine Wars right now, if we bothered to spend at this level of efficiency.
The efficiency would plummet off a cliff if the US even tried to approach that level of conflict.
This is incredibly GDP brained thinking. The numbers are not immutable facts that exist as a natural law, ultimately you have to produce those items in the real world. Trying to support that many conflicts at once, which would be fighting on a scale of a world war, would see the US forced to spend 30-40% of it's GDP on war.
That's definitely embarrassing and shows that quantifying the military in dollars is misleading. For instance, last year the Pentagon said China was acquiring weapons 5x faster than the US. But China's budget is about a third I believe. To make matters worse for the Americans, you need industry to build weapons, and American industry is much smaller than China's. So there's probably not even the industrial capacity for the Pentagon to quintuple its weapons acquisitions.
Using % because if you say $114 billion you sound like an insane person.
Using % because if you say $114 billion you can see that that’s a higher number than Russia’s yearly military budget and Ukraine still isn’t winning
Yes, but we're only spending 6% of the overall national budget. You're missing the point. These numbers mean that you can do this shit 16x over, globally while operating at-cost. We could have 16 different Russia-Ukraine Wars right now, if we bothered to spend at this level of efficiency.
:porky-happy:
The efficiency would plummet off a cliff if the US even tried to approach that level of conflict.
This is incredibly GDP brained thinking. The numbers are not immutable facts that exist as a natural law, ultimately you have to produce those items in the real world. Trying to support that many conflicts at once, which would be fighting on a scale of a world war, would see the US forced to spend 30-40% of it's GDP on war.
That's definitely embarrassing and shows that quantifying the military in dollars is misleading. For instance, last year the Pentagon said China was acquiring weapons 5x faster than the US. But China's budget is about a third I believe. To make matters worse for the Americans, you need industry to build weapons, and American industry is much smaller than China's. So there's probably not even the industrial capacity for the Pentagon to quintuple its weapons acquisitions.
bc most of the money is funneled to MIC shareholders, execs, and DoD PMCs
The shareholders were upset we left Afghanistan so we need something else to dump money into.
Oh, America offshored everything but weapons manufacturing. Those factories, we still have in abundance.
Distributed evenly throughout every congressional district, so if there is ever a cut in spending, they will make sure to hurt all of them.