Foreign Policy/National & International Security

[dismalist]

I doubt you really need to spend three times more than China or ten times more than Russia. You probably also don't need all your facilities to operate at 21% excess capacity

Dollar comparisons of international spending on the military, or anything else, are largely meaningless. Chinese soldiers, e.g., are paid, and/or have an opportunity cost well below a US soldier. And on and on. here, dollars do not translate into strength.

[polly_mer]

That's fine, but the cybersecurity budget is ~$10 billion, the cyberspace budget is ~$10 billion, and the new tech budget is ~$107 billion (and, frankly, it probably doesn't need to be so high).

Estimated total military spending (excluding wars) is what, $934 billion? There's a lot of fat you can trim if you rethink your priorities. I doubt you really need to spend three times more than China or ten times more than Russia. You probably also don't need all your facilities to operate at 21% excess capacity

But it all depends on your priorities, doesn't it?

Those are numbers. 

What is required to do the job when push comes to shove?

How much help will our allies be when push comes to shove?

How does our current aging equipment compare to the known new functionalities of Russia and China?

Focusing on magnitude alone is not productive.

Again, what studies, white papers, or other research are you consulting to make informed conclusions regarding "fat" in view of the goals of having a military and the threats for the next 30 years?

[Parasaurolophus]

I don't have any special expertise. I will occasionally read a related white paper or listen to an expert give a talk. (I do play a fair few related games, but I wouldn't count that as knowledge). My military history is excellent, but again, that's not especially relevant here.

I won't pretend that's expert knowledge. And I know you do or have done some defense-related work. And I'm happy to defer to that expertise. And I don't doubt that most of the current spending can be justified (whether it is is a different matter). A third of DoD's budget goes to personnel, for example. Those are clearly necessary costs--if you think that current personnel levels are crucially important. If you interrogate that premise however, it doesn't seem particularly clear that that is the case.

Which is why I've been trying to say that everything here hinges on what your priorities are. If you want to be able to invade other countries, or conduct foreign wars, your needs will be different from what they'd be if you didn't. If you're worried about a barbarian invasion, you'll have different needs and expenditures.

"Safety" always gets brought up in these discussions, but it's pretty nonsensical. It's a nebulous feeling that trades on fears of invasion and the like rather than more likely threats.

I don't think the US should be prioritizing its ability to conduct foreign wars, so when I look at the numbers, it's pretty hard to see them as justified. If I bought the premise that the country's military capabilities should be used differently, then I would. But that's an awfully hard sell, and nobody here is making it.

[Golazo]

A lot of this is prioritization: what threats or challenges will be most important in 30 years: climate & environment, natural disasters, pandemics, revisionist states, terrorism and non-state actors, organized crime etc etc. You have to prioritize, because by trying to protect against everything, you end up protecting against nothing.

China is a particular problem--cooperation with China is essential for climate, but highly problematic for a US-backed liberal order.

On budgeting, a big question is what capabilities you actually get for what you spend, and if these are the capabilities you will want in 15 years when your new systems or technology are in play. Ie, are your assumptions right. It is not unreasonable to say the climate & environment and pandemics will be greater threats to the US than China and budgeting should reflect this. Unpacking these assumptions is the hard part. The new NIC report is an interesting starting point: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf

I'm not so sure that boots on the ground are out of fashion--arguably a lot of the lessons of the last 20 years, from Iraq to Syria to Crimea to Yemen, is that replacements are overrated in actually creating facts that endure.