Of course, spending doesn’t actually directly translate into being able to make decent weapons. Since US relies on a privately owned military industrial complex it runs into the problem of perverse incentives. Companies want to siphon as much public money as they can from the government, and that means making expensive weapons that take a long time to produce and have high maintenance costs. This ensures you have low input costs because you’re not producing much, and that you’re able to keep sucking money out of the system for the few items you do produce. To put this into perspective, it costs ten times as much to produce an artillery shell in US than in Russia, and US is still unable to ramp up its production after a year and a half of war to match Russia.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is famous for its corruption having failed audits for 6 years in a row and is unable to account for $3.8 trillion in military assets.
All of this results in an incredibly expensive and inefficient system that isn’t actually able to produce basic things like artillery shells in large quantities. US military industrial complex is good at doing what it was designed to do, which is to divert taxes from things they’re meant for such as social services and infrastructure into the pockets of the oligarchs who own the war industry.
Yes, the US is bad, we can all agree on that. It is not a forgivable thing in a democratic country to have such an out of control oligarchy.
That said, why would the US or NATO want to ramp up production?
Look at how Russia in 2010. A major player as it had insane weapon stockpiles, nuclear capabilities and weakened but still strong alliances in Eastern Europe in Ukraine and Belarus. It had the EU by the balls through gas shipments. NATO was an irrelevant relic.
How does it look like now? It lost Ukraine as an ally, Belarus is not being helpful either. It is spending a significant portion of its weapon stockpiles on destroying a country that was one of its closest allies, while making money for the US. Every house destroyed is a contract for Blackrock, every fighter shot down is a new sale for Lockheed.
The war in Ukraine is grinding down Russia from being a major power, while the US is making bank off of it. It’s just going “Aw shucks we aren’t able to supply enough munitions to kick out Russia and stop this racket, guess you’ll need to knock out a few thousand more tanks!”
What I’m saying is that neither US nor EU are capable of ramping up production. Despite all the talk over the past year and a half, no serious ramp up in production has been seen. Meanwhile, Europe is now going into a recession and spending increasingly more money on the military is going to require more austerity which will in turn keep driving civil unrest.
Also, not sure what universe you live in where Russia is being ground down from a major power buddy. Russian economy is currently booming even according to western sources, Russian industrial production is at six year high, and Russian global trade is as big as it’s ever been. If you think Russia came out of this worse than the west then you really need to stop guzzling propaganda.
Might want to listen what a US ambassador had to say the issue just recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghvaq1AosN8
Shouldn’t it be adjusting for buying power? Chinese tanks are also cheaper.
Probably complicates things. If we’re taking into account the cheapness of Chinese tanks, maybe we need to evaluate the strength of American tanks and equipment vs Chinese equipment.
Spending seems like a better way to get an idea.
As we’ve seen in Ukraine and other conflicts where US equipment has been used, it’s certainly nothing to write home about.
??? Infantry in Ukraine are able to easily take out tanks if they don’t come properly supported thanks to our anti tank munitions. This is something Russia didn’t anticipate or else they wanted have gotten so many tanks destroyed. That’s such a huge impact. Also, we haven’t even provided our newest planes to Ukraine, and still Ukraine pushed Russia back quite a bit. This war has shown how big of a difference US equipment is vs Russian.
meanwhile in the real world https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-russia-canadian-forces-1.6443048
Lol what? This single story counts as statistical evidence or something?
No, this story is representative of many other stories and reports as anybody who actually has a clue would know.
You think Freedom is free.
This is really a bad chart, our military protects European countries which is why they don’t have to pay as much for defense
Edit: not to imply we don’t waste tons of money on boondoggles
our military protects European countries
Please give me a list of enough threats the US protected Europe from to back your statement. I doubt there are enough to justify those differences, and hence your statement must be doubted until you prove otherwise.
Well we in Finland joined NATO because of Russia. Same for most of Eastern Europe.
I’m quite glad US spends a shitload on defence tbqh. Way too much, but it’s not out of my pocket…
Finland joined NATO because of fearmongering. I am yet to see a real threat. Now can you answer my question? If not, then it says enough.
We joined because Russia attacked Ukraine. We neighbor Russia. Seemed real enough to us.
Eastern Europe obviously knows more about this than even us.
If they are so good at protecting Europe, why don’t they protect Ukraine, instead of fueling the profits of the military industrial complex? Why do they keep letting hostilities and murder happen? Sounds like they aren’t deterring threats very well.
Ukraine war proves you wrong. When the threat is real, they do not deter it.
This isn’t to mention that Finland has not faced the same circumstances of Ukraine that led up to the war there, which goes back to my feafmongering claim.
But again, if you think Finland is under the same threat as Ukraine (it’s not), the US has failed to protect it. But they have successfully made a lot of profit for military corporations.
Ukraine wasn’t in NATO. That’s the point.
If they are so good at protecting Europe, why don’t they protect Ukraine
Goalposts moved - initial claim was that the US defense budget protects european countries, not all European countries. If that was the case, even Russia would be included as needing American protection.
Once a country is involved in a conflict, they cannot join NATO. You are proposing a logical catch 22 in which countries that join NATO only do so out of fear mongering (in your opinion), and countries that actually are involved in conflicts cannot join NATO, and thus will not be protected by the US. Finally, NATO countries aren’t being attacked, so unless you recognize the value of deterrence, there will never really be a chance to provide examples that fit into the framework you’ve set up.
I hope you do recognize the value of deterrence, and I also hope you recognize someone can’t provide examples of things that were prevented due to deterrence, since they never happened.
The threat of Russian involvement in Ukraine was known wayyyy ahead of the invasion actually occurring. Ukraine tried hard to join NATO to “deter” it but they never allowed it. So yeah, they don’t deter shit.
If Russia had plans to invade Finland like they did Ukraine, we don’t know if that would have gotten them into NATO.
Which attempt to join NATO are you talking about? IIRC one was retracted by the president of Ukraine and the other was already after crimea.
What’s your reasoning behind Finland being a bad example again, beyond a “fear mongering” label that you’ve applied without explaining?
It’s when you realize that some US Americans unironicaly believe that, that you understand how powerful the USA propaganda machine is.
