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More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.
In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.
Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.
So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.
What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?
This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.
Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.
How big do you perceive the stick to currently be? I've been hearing for some time that our army is fairly clapped out, and notable signs of serious dysfunction in the Navy have been numerous for at least the last decade. We are very clearly going through a paradigm shift in terms of military technology that puts the value of our current stock of gear and doctrine into serious question.
Even if we're going prompt full isolationist, having a functional, effective military seems like a good idea, and I'm not confident we have one right now. Further, fixing that seems like a good way to drive native industrial buildup, which I definitely think we need.
I would strongly prefer this be achieved by fixing the current dysfunction rather than by feeding it more cash, but increased military spending does not seem obviously foolish to me.
The record of the government is that trying to fix dysfunction with more money makes it worse.
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I think one of the underappreciated costs of the War on Terror was that the US dropped the ball on R&D/replacement programs. As a result we're still using a lot of old Cold War Vintage kit.
Even though I would like to see the US military slimmed somewhat, I am in a vacuum a fan of more short-term military spending just to
The problem is the military will then turn around and make a contract with Lockheed Martin for the GigaShell9000, which does everything a regular artillery shell does but costs 2.8 million dollars per unit and four billion dollars up front for R&D. Lockheed estimates the first five shells will role off the assembly line in 2033 but they should able to produce as many as 92 shells per year, once their production line gets fully spun up in the summer of 2045.
Just imagine that I am screaming like Luke Skywalker being tortured by the Emperor at the end of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
I am a tiny bit optimistic that some of the fresh blood in the market and a sense of urgency will maybe pare this down a bit, though.
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Yup - projects like the Comanche are revealing, I think. I'm no expert, but I'd figure that such a weapon could have been a highly useful and survivable platform in a Ukraine scenario compared to a new generation of Apache with some new gizmos attached, but the Army needed to allocate resources to getting a ton of mine-resistant trucks, not a sci-fi stealth helicopter. And those trucks probably won't be that useful in a war full of missiles, drones, and artillery - hence those MRAPs just got sold to police departments. Huge waste to high-end acquisitions.
Given that the US and Ukraine coalition didn't provide older helicopters, I doubt they would have given it a cutting-edge helicopter either. And that decision wasn't simply for a lack of helicopters- it was consistent with the relative(ly low) utility of combat helicopters in the war after the very early period.
I meant if the US was involved in a war of this nature, sorry that I wasn't clear. The US radically altered its aviation plans in response to Ukraine, canceling their planned scout helicopter (which didn't have a lot of the advantages the more expensive Comanche would have) because of how survivable modern helicopters look. A war with the kind of air defense Russia has would be really bloody for Army Aviation and the Comanche probably would have given them an edge they don't have currently, and it's a perfect example of a project that was canceled for the war on terror, in which Army aviation was pushed to the breaking point and had to devote everything they could to keeping the old stuff they had running.
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