You have to remember that US military spending is so high because it makes money for the military industrial complex and therefore the oligarchs who own it and the nation. Because it is a money making tool before it is a legitimate supply chain, the markups/margins are insane. The US pays 10× more for each missile/spoon/bullet/etc with its profit motive system, than for instance China with its planned, at cost system. So really the US military only appears to have 1t yearly value when it’s more like 100b a year.

Tldr, yes, paper tiger.

Something to tease out from the other comments and the OP, and to make explicit…

There is an assumption that militaries are designed to ‘win’ and that wars are fought to ‘be won’.

A lot of war stories, especially those about medieval wars and those concerning WWI and WWII give this impression.

But what does it mean to ‘win’ a modern war? What would that look like in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Vietnam, Korea, Ukraine, etc?

In medieval England, things might seem a bit clearer. Like, Alfred the Great defeating the Danes. Or Ceaser conquering gaul. Or Alexander the Great slaughtering everyone between Greece and India. Or the Greeks burning Troy. These are relatively clear cut – at least in the popular way that we learn about these wars.

But in modern times? When the reasons for war are so murky and the people conducting them hide behind logos and smokescreens? When the people conducting the wars lie about or simply never admit to being involved?

The destruction is the point. The longer the war, the more weapons sold. Or, rather, the more opportunities to sell weapons that don’t even need to make it to the front lines. The more destructive the war, the more contracts available afterwards to rebuild what was destroyed.

And beyond these obvious financial benefits that come from just blowing shit up, the simple fact of an ongoing war comes with a lot of other types of moneymaking:

• selling war movies, series, games, and books
• making journalistic careers
• selling papers
• having a sensational narrative to keep the news cycle interesting
• justification for hiking the price of gas
• justification for hiking other prices
• distraction from the domestic problems in other countries (sorry, we can’t fix this or that problem, don’t you know there’s a war on?)
• making people thankful for a large military budget
• etc

It seems to me that even if the US spent $1tr on its military at cost, it would still not try to finish it’s wars quickly. There’s too much money to be made in the process.

Since the 90s NATO’s doctrine has become increasingly focused on counter-insurgency, favouring decentralization of military leadership, weapons and technologies that favour attacking cells rather than fronts, etc.

This explains NATO’s complete failure to get a win in Ukraine.

NATO is in the process of retooling to better meet the challenge of Russia and China, this is most evident in the US and the UK. And of those two, it’s far more evident in the former. If Russia had waited just another year or two the war in Ukraine would be going differently.

Though we also have to mention, prolonged states of war are highly profitable to the military-industrial complex. 20 years of Afghanistan made a small handful of people billions of dollars, they like when conflicts get drawn out. The longer a military needs to be supplied, the longer the warmongers get paid. If all of NATO’s conflicts ended today, the entire military industry would collapse under its own weight.

The genocide of Palestine can’t and won’t end until the MIC is dismantled, the same is/was true of the genocide in the Donbas and of the war on terror.

Military spending being so high isn’t for the production of weapons, it’s so oligarchs can get paid.

I say this all the time but people don’t want to hear it. The US military is at least a hundred times over value for the budget. Probably over a thousand. It’s a racketeering operation. We all know this but we don’t connect the dots that this would severely hinder military capability. How much does the US have to spend to to get something done, how much would Russia or China have to pay to do the same thing? Look at Ukraine. The US spent the entire Russian budget on their little war and to what effect? Russia was able to remain in control of the situation with very minor limited operations.

Not only that but the US has too many military obligations. It’s got its hands in too many places how much of the US’s capacity occupied with it’s many projects. People talk about the US military as if it was actually able to use it, but it can’t pay too much attention to one project without jeopardizing its thousand other schemes.

One thing about our military spending that a lot of people don’t understand is that a lot of it is purposefully wasted to be used as a job program. We build planes and tanks that we never plan on using because someone in Congress doesn’t want to be the reason the plant gets shut down, especially since most of them are the only thing keeping rural towns afloat. The vast majority of it is just a racket that can’t be shut down without destroying entire towns. This is also why our prisons will never get shut down. Our rural towns used to be where a lot of our manufacturing was done, with a single factory being where almost everyone worked. Now, it’s almost all just prisons, wasted manufacturing in our military budget, and Walmarts.

Yes. Absolutely. A planned military economy led to the USSR being able to pump out tanks for instance at an unprecedented scale, because every part, every missile, every machine gun was made with the express purpose of working within the same machine and with state oversight. Here, you’ve got several different military manufacturers making separate parts of each machine. Sometimes these manufacturers don’t get along. Sometimes their specs are incorrect and machine parts literally do not work for the model they’re working on. And just like every other industry in this shithole, the military economy is primarily focused on speculation and price means utterly nothing when it comes to the actual efficacy of weaponry.

But what if the US is doing that… But also allowing the profit motive to have a say? Im starting to think that the USA is blowing money on overvalued systems that are AT BEST, MAYBE a tiny bit more effective than the oppositions’ weapons.

Ever heard of the F-35 Lightning? Originally touted as America’s next generation jet fighter, a multirole monster decked out with the latest in cutting edge capabilities, the project to develop, manufacture and service this jet has massively underperformed and is still riddled with flaws, some of which are enormous. These jets have been known to simply fall out of the sky due to catastrophic engine failure, that’s just how big of a problem this plane has. This gargantuan fuck up of a project has cost the US taxpayer more than $1.5 trillion, much of which is simply because the Pentagon is saddled with an institutional form of the sunk cost fallacy; that so much of the Pentagon’s budget and other related expenses are now tied up in the F-35 that to bin off the project would have enormous ramifications for the military industrial complex in general. Lockheed Martin makes enormous bank off of their contracts with the military to develop this hopeless jet fighter. To me, the Lightning is emblematic of the issue with modern, “high-tech” warfare.

Most of these over-engineered monstrosities are either hopelessly overcomplicated and delicate pieces of machinery that are prone to failure, or else their complexity is such that refits and maintenance takes far too long and the extremely involved production processes necessary to produce them means that if the whole pre-war stockpile are knocked out of action the turn around on replacing them can be anywhere from a year to 2 years. Naturally, no army can realistically hope to wait that long for new tanks and jets. Its the same general principle of industrial warfare as the T-34 vs the Panther during WW2. By all accounts, the Panther was the superior tank. However, T-34s were far simpler to produce at scale, and consequently outnumbered the Panther on an enormous scale. The specs and operational efficiency of a given unit doesn’t mean much if you simply can’t produce enough units for your operational needs. It was a significant factor in the WW2 struggle between Fascism and Socialism, and it remains so now.

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They’ve spent the better part of 70 years fighting enemies that are technically inferior with vastly smaller mechanized capabilities and basically losing in the long-term every time. The military industry in the US is a racket just like everything else in the US.

I know as a matter of fact that in the military, very little of that money is going into ships, buildings or paychecks. So whose to say what all that military spending is really contributing towards.

You’re entirely right, the weapons are developed for profit. The entire system is designed to make a couple people rich, not to create the best fighting organization the world has ever seen. All you really need to know to come to that conclusion is that the US military has never been audited. Audits have been attempted, and they have failed.

Edit: another important thing to mention is the US uses military spending abroad to enforce USD hegemony as a global reserve currency. It’s in the economic interest of the US in terms of international relations to have an expensive military presence abroad.

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have to remember the size of the american army is gigantic in size and with bases around the world maintaining all personnel and equipment is expensive in addition to contracts and development which is private which is more money going to private companies, so a good part of the budget goes just to Maintenance like that.

none of us can know for certain. but i certainly hope it is. just remember to not underestimate it.