These debates about the military budget involve people talking past each other because they disagree on what would happen if we stopped spending that money.
Nobody educated on the subject things we spend $620 billion just in case we need to beat the next 7 armies on the list. We do it because spending more than the next 7 armies on the list ensures that it is pointless for any other state to even try to challenge U.S. hegemony. Nobody knows what the world would look like if the U.S. abdicated its role as world police but a lot of people are willing to spend that money to not have to find out what happens.
And its not unreasonable to be afraid of that hypothetical. The western world spent hundreds of years at war with each other. That period culminated in Europeans killing tens of millions of each others' people. Today, instead of shooting each other in the face as their grandparents did, French and Germans hold hands in the EU. What the hell happened? A very plausible explanation is that when the U.S. became unchallengable after World War II, it became pointless for any European country to cultivate aspirations of global power. That dramatically reduced the geopolitical instability that comes with countries vying for regional or global dominance.
I question the explanation that it primarily was USA's military dominance that kept Europeans from further local military conflicts after WW2. Other factors that can explain why Europeans haven't started wars against each other are: democratization of the region, increased standard of living and the growth of the middle class, war fatigue and strong anti-war sentiment after having lived through WW2, increased trade, the forming of the United Nations, and regionally perhaps more impactfull the European union, and involuntarily being at the centre of the cold war.
Unfortunately I have no references to prove the relative impact of these alternative explanations compared to rayiner's. Still I'd suggest that using the strength of USA's military force as a sole or even primary explanation of post-WW2 peace in Europe is an oversimplification.
> spending more than the next 7 armies on the list ensures that it is pointless for any other state to even try to challenge U.S. hegemony.
Hmm, I think that's exactly what Vladimir Putin is doing right now. I mean he's pretty explicit about it. Xi's being a bit subtler about it, but he's kind of doing the same thing. Also, it seems like the US kind of lost the last couple of wars it got into, the ones in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, even though Daesh and Libya Dawn don't have US$610B/year budgets.
More to the point, though, when the US military spends US$43 million on a gas station that would cost anyone else US$½ million, it becomes plausible that someone could have a stronger military even head-to-head than your US$610B/year military, even if their budget is, say, US$8B/year. Like, say, Singapore or Algeria. All they'd have to do is be spending their money on things that actually work instead of corruption-driven boondoggles. Wasting money doesn't win wars.
Would the US really lose if it got into a war with Algeria or, more realistically, Iran (who's currently supporting Russia's attacks against Daesh, over US protest)? Hard to say. Depends in part on how much of that US$610B is getting squandered, in part on whether Iran has a plan for shooting down GPS†, stuff like that. Aircraft carriers versus supercavitating torpedoes is going to be an interesting experiment when it happens. I'm glad I won't be on the carrier.
(Might also depend on what happens if the US nukes Singapore, which is after all a mostly-not-subterranean city-state. Would it trigger a global thermonuclear war, obliterating the US?)
> A very plausible explanation is that when the U.S. became unchalleng[e]able after World War II, it became pointless for any European country to cultivate aspirations of global power.
I can't tell whether you haven't heard of the Cold War or you don't realize that Moscow is in Europe. Either way, maybe you shouldn't be starting sentences with "nobody educated on the subject thin[k]s".
† Does this sound implausible? It shouldn't. Iran has had Scuds for 30 years, and it's been making its own for more than 20 years. Iran has been able to launch things into orbit since 2008, and if my calculations are right, you only have to go half as fast as orbital velocity to reach a GPS satellite, and then Kessler Syndrome might take care of the rest. And don't forget, launching into orbit means they can get a radioactive dust cloud or ten thousand individually-guided tungsten lawn darts to a point of their choosing within the US within a few minutes of launch.
That depends on what you mean by "lost". Look at the map of US military influence before 2000 and after 2014. Is the US today (a) better positioned to project force, (b) about the same, (c) worse? Not many people would argue (c), and the map strongly suggests (a).
We're not not engaging ISIS because we can't. We certainly could beat them back into hiding. We just don't want to. (I'm glad of that.)
The important metric isn't the ratio of what we spend on the military to what others spend. It's something more like a ratio of the effectivenesses of the militaries, however you'd like to formulate that.
I agree, but why is U.S. subsidizing the whole world without getting as much benefit? Its not just this, U.S. is subsidizing the whole world's healthcare costs too.
Nobody educated on the subject things we spend $620 billion just in case we need to beat the next 7 armies on the list. We do it because spending more than the next 7 armies on the list ensures that it is pointless for any other state to even try to challenge U.S. hegemony. Nobody knows what the world would look like if the U.S. abdicated its role as world police but a lot of people are willing to spend that money to not have to find out what happens.
And its not unreasonable to be afraid of that hypothetical. The western world spent hundreds of years at war with each other. That period culminated in Europeans killing tens of millions of each others' people. Today, instead of shooting each other in the face as their grandparents did, French and Germans hold hands in the EU. What the hell happened? A very plausible explanation is that when the U.S. became unchallengable after World War II, it became pointless for any European country to cultivate aspirations of global power. That dramatically reduced the geopolitical instability that comes with countries vying for regional or global dominance.