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The Great American Military Rip-Off (and why Russia and China are gaining in defense)

21st Century Wire says…

Is the rest of the world catching up to the US in the military arena? Is the US simply bogged down with too much politics, pork and pink elephants?

Last week, Russian leader Vladimir Putin gave a public rebuttal to an open media challenge leveled by BBC veteran correspondent John Simpson, after Simpson accused Russia of being an ‘international aggressor’ in the both Europe and the Middle East.

Putin responded sharply by pointing that while Washington’s annual defense and military budget totals well over $600 billion, Russia’s annual budget is a meager $70 – $80 billion in comparison, and while the US operates well over 1,000 military bases and outposts globally, Russia has only two.

In light of Russia’s recent effectiveness in striking terrorist targets in Syria, this raises another very important question: is Russia getting more “bang for its buck” in terms of defense than the US?

A more apt question from American taxpayers might be: is the US military so over-bloated that it’s no longer competitive in real terms? That said, just how badly is the federal government ripping off the American taxpayer?

In a recent post by Washington’s Blog, the case has been made for Russia and China making significant gains on the US position of global eminence, and it explains why. This from Washington’s Blog

F-35-Money-4-copy
TRILLION DOLLAR LEMON: US F-35 Fighter project has deemed the country’s most expensive failure ever.

“The SecDef [US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter] issued this warning before Russia stunned the U.S. with its long-range missile and electronic communications-jamming capacities.

How could this be happening, when U.S. military spending dwarfs that from the rest of the world?

There are six reasons …

1. Corruption and Pork. America spends a large percentage of it’s defense spending on unnecessary military programs that:

  • The generals say aren’t helpful and don’t even want
  • Redundant personnel, programs and systems which don’t increase our war-fighting capacity
  • Equipment which is built and then immediately mothballed before it is ever used

Indeed – as many lottery winners and star athletes will tell you – it’s easy to piss away even huge sums of money over a couple of years’ time without discipline.

And plain old corruption is wasting huge sums and dramatically weakening our national security.

How much are we talking about?

Well, here’s some indication: $8.5 trillion dollars in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 … has never been accounted for.

2. Fighting the Wrong Wars. A closely-related issue is that the war-fighting assets are being squandered, spread thin and distracted by fighting wars which decrease our national security.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the most expensive in U.S. history, costing between between $4 trillion and $6 trillion dollars.

And we spent additional boatloads of money carrying out regime change in Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

But these wars have only caused ISIS and the Taliban to flourish.

Indeed, the majority of our defense spending is – literally – making us less secure because we’re spending money to fight the wrong wars:

  • We’re overthrowing the moderates who help insure stability
  • We’re arming and supporting brutal dictators … which is one of the main reasons that terrorists want to attack the U.S.
  • We’ve fought a series of wars for petrochemicals, instead of security
  • We expend huge sums of money on mass surveillance … but top security experts agree that mass surveillance makes us MORE vulnerable to terrorists (we’re targeting the wrong guys)

3. Never-Ending War Destroys the Economy. We’re in the longest continuous period of war in U.S. history.  The Afghanistan War has  been going on for 14 years … as long as the Civil War (4 years,), WW1 (4 years) and WW2 (6 years) COMBINED.

Wars which drag on are horrible for our economy.  A weak economy – in turn – makes it more difficult to sustain a leadership role in defense in the long-run.

And Americans are sick and tired of war.  If our national security was actually threatened, it might be hard for the government to rouse our commitment and motivation.

4. More Bang for the Buck. China has the world’s largest economy when measured by “purchasing power parity” … meaning how much Chinese can buy in their their local currency in their local economy. And see this.

Therefore, China can buy locally-produced military parts and services more cheaply than the U.S. can.

1-Global-defense-comparison
As Bloomberg noted last year:

The lowest-paid U.S. soldiers earn about $18,000 a year. In comparison, in 2009, an equivalent Chinese soldier was paid about a ninth as much. In other words, in 2009, you could hire about nine Chinese soldiers for the cost of one U.S. soldier.

Even that figure doesn’t account for health care and veterans’ benefits. These are much higher in the U.S. than in China, though precise figures are hard to obtain. This is due to higher U.S. prices for health care, to higher prices in general, and because the U.S. is more generous than China in terms of what it pays its soldiers. Salaries and benefits, combined, account for a significant percentage of military expenditure.

But labor costs aren’t the only thing that is cheaper in China. Notice that China’s gross domestic product at market exchange rates is only two-thirds of its GDP at purchasing power parity. This means that, as a developing country, China simply pays lower prices for a lot of things. Some military inputs — oil, for example, or copper — will be bought on world markets, and PPP won’t matter. For others, like complicated machinery, costs are pretty similar. But other things — food or domestically manufactured products — will be much cheaper for the U.S.’s developing rivals than for the U.S.

Those who follow global security issues have known about this issue for a long time. But somehow, this fact hasn’t penetrated the consciousness of pundits or made its way into pretty, tweet-able graphs.

5. Theft. The U.S. Naval Institute, Fiscal Times and others document that the Chinese have greatly accelerated their weapons development timeline by spying on the West and shamelessly copying our military inventions and designs.

If the NSA and other spying agencies had used their resources to stop foreign governments from stealing our crown jewels – instead of using them to gain petty advantages for a handful of knuckleheads – we’d be a lot better off today.

6. Geography.  Russia is almost twice the size of the U.S.  Russia and China together are so massive – forming such a giant swath of land-based territory, so much closer to the Middle East than America is – that it gives their militaries an advantage.

Bloomberg points out:

The U.S., situated in the peaceful, relatively unpopulated Western Hemisphere, is very far away from the location of any foreseeable conflict. China isn’t going to invade Colorado (sorry, “Red Dawn” fans!), but it might invade Taiwan or India. Simply getting our forces to the other side of the world would require enormous up-front expenditures.

The National Interest notes:

“Defeating China in these scenarios [Taiwan and South China Sea] could nonetheless be difficult and costly for the United States’ primarily as a result of the geographic advantages that China enjoys, as well as specific systems capabilities.”

***

A recent RAND report, “The US China Military Scorecard,” … argues that China is catching up to the U.S., is becoming more assertive and confident, and has geography on its side.

And Russia’s proximity to Ukraine, the Baltics and other neighboring countries gives it a huge advantage.

Postscript: Sadly, because we’ve squandered our resources, war games show that the U.S. is no longer invincible…”

See the full post at Washington’s Blog

READ MORE PENTAGON NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Pentagon Files

 

 

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