Sunday, October 3, 2004
Here are a pair of excellent posts on America's military spending and capabilities compared to other nations. Specifically, how our enormous GDP leads to equally enormous military spending, and why it is fatuous at best to expect other nations to be able to contribute either forces or cash that measure up in any way to something resembling a "fair contribution" on numbers alone. They just don't have the troops or the cash to contribute. This is, of course, something most of us understand already, but it is good to have a few of the numbers.
Right Reason: What Other Countries, Senator?:
In military matters, the US spends $370.7 billion. This exceeds the next 15 largest defense budgets combined ($370.7 billion-$365.4 billion). Out of those 15, the US has assistance from 6 nations (formerly 7, before Spain Muniched out) totalling defense expenditures of $154 billion. So out of the top 16 defense spenders in the world, 7 are in Iraq. Those that are not: China, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, Spain, Canada, and Israel. Out of that list, half (China, Russia, Saudia Arabia, India, and Israel) can safely be put in the category of "We either don't won't their help, or their help would be counterproductive."
So tell me, out of France, Germany, Brazil, Spain, or Canda (total defesne budget: $110.3 billion, less than 1/3 of US defense spending), which ones would have to join before it would be a real alliance?...
More here.
Now before someone says, "Well why does the US choose to spend so much? Couldn't we take some of that money and put it into other things? This just shows what war mongers we really are." Let me respond.
This is the price you pay for being number one. This is the price you pay when your economy is so huge that you necessarily have interests far and wide on an ever-shrinking planet.
The Far-Left fantasy and the Paleo-Con daydream of an isolationist America with a small military sitting inside safe bases on home turf is pure fluff. The America-First isolationist yearning was a dandelion waiting to be blown away 90 years ago at the outbreak of the Great War. It's even more irrational now. Our citizens and our business interests span the globe. Our enormous cultural output (movies, music, IDEAS...) - things no President or potentate, particularly in a free society, can possibly stop - permeate every square inch of the globe. We don't need to bomb anyone to make them angry - our unintended exports (our "Cultural Imperialism") rattles and riles them just fine on its own. You don't need bullets to make friction. And you don't need to kill to create resentment and hate.
But when that friction reaches the boiling point, you're going to need those guns to protect our people, our interests, our lifestyle and our way of life. Particularly in a world where small groups of madmen can take advantage of modern technology to murder millions with a missile, a back-pack bomb or a germ.
Abraham Lincoln said:
It is still a beautiful and brilliant speech, but Lincoln could never have imagined the terrible possibilities that modern technology has brought along with its amazing wonders. It may still be that we connot be crushed, but the existence of danger and the need to project power overseas - due to our great interests that exist overseas that no man has the power to stop - are at a level that even the great man could not possibly have imagined. No leader has the power to withdraw from that, since no leader chose to engage in it.
Americans have lost sight of just how enormous our nation is. We have outdistanced our elders in the Old World by an order of magnitude. There is no going back. Imagining that the older nations have the capability of "shoulding the burden" at anything like an equal share - even if they wanted to, which some don't - is a deluded fantasy, and any politician trying to sell you on that idea is indeed selling something. Don't buy.
