This comes from the military budget; they can light Cuban cigars with hundred dollar bills as a rounding error. The US Navy has 11 large fleet aircraft carriers, 9 assault carriers, when the rest of the World considers two carriers to be a lot. Schools hold bake sales to buy supplies, the Pentagon/The Congress spends a Trillion USD on a new manned fighter we don't need just to shovel pork into as many Congressional districts as possible.
In a similar vein as our Carriers, we have 123 military satellites. Since the X-37 is maneuverable and reusable, it might be cheaper in the long run than more satellites.
It’s hard to quantify because military supremacy and having the best weapons in the world is a huge part of why the dollar is THE global currency. And we can print dollars, hell we just printed 5 trillion in a couple weeks. This gives us insane leverage when it comes to foreign debts because most debts are in dollars. The dollars for military budget and the dollars raised by a school fundraiser are not even the same currency.
> [...] military supremacy and having the best weapons in the world is a huge part of why the dollar is THE global currency.
However, in "How the United States Could Lose a Great-Power War" (RAND, 2019)[0], we read:
> [...] For now, U.S. forces appear poorly postured to meet these challenges. That's because both Russia and China have developed formidable networks of missiles, radars, electronic warfare systems, and the like to degrade and potentially even block U.S. forces' ability to operate in the Western Pacific and Eastern Europe to defend allies and partners in those regions. China in particular is developing increasingly impressive capabilities to project military farther afield, including through systems such as aircraft carriers, long-range aviation, and nuclear-powered submarines. Together, these forces have tilted the military balance over places such as Taiwan and the Baltic states from unquestioned U.S. dominance to something much more competitive.
And[1]
> The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. [...]
The United States is done fighting Great Power wars. No one talks about it publicly at all because doing so would shatter America's self-image as the Lone Superpower. The military the United States has now is quite capable of wrecking any nation that is not another Great Power. I say wrecking and not defeating, because as should be obvious from the last three decades, the United States has zero interest in winning wars. It really doesn't even bother trying - too expensive, and too hard. Instead the United States has made it very clear that if you displease it too much, and aren't another Great Power, it will trash your nation, and then either walk away or hang around stomping on you every so often.
The unspoken assumption is that there never will be a "real" war with China or Russia or any other 'near peer'. Whether that ultimately turns out to have been a foolish approach remains to be seen. But, it does leave a lot of money floating around to be siphoned off by various parts of the military-security industry, because Americans think they're paying for a Cold War military, when what they're actually getting is a military good for knocking down weaker opponents and then kicking them, but that barely even tries to pretend it can do anything else. (Except via propaganda, which is really cheap compared to manpower and materiel.)
I think it was the British and the French who brought freedom to Libya. Foreign intervention seems to nearly always make things worse. Just the other day there was an appalling attack on a maternity hospital in Afghanistan. People are saying that the West needs to do something...
The military intervention in Libya was initially led by the United States and then handed off to NATO. The US contribution to direct attacks consisted mostly of cruise missile strikes. The British, French and Canadian air forces also played a major roles.
The amount of deaths and horror that freedom has brought to Libya is soul crushing. I would wager that a good percentage of Libyans would Trade that freedom for the dictatorship with all that it entails, obviously not those that suffered injustice of a dictatorship but the majority ... work home life ...
As an American, who is also a veteran of OIF II, it really dismayed me to watch what happened in Libya. Granted, I did watch the liveleak of the end of Gadaffi and I'm not sad a truly horrible human being is no longer in charge of a country. That said, I'm very sad for the people who have to endure so much upheaval.
The reality is that you can't go from a strongman authoritarian to a magical well functioning democracy overnight (or maybe even ever) without a a few generations of change. It is really heart breaking to see it.
I guess "freedom" can't just be the dismantling of a government. Since "freedom" as our societies value it only emerges in the context of some ordered society and government that protects those things.
The problem in those places seems to not have been, how hard is it to get rid of the established order, but rather, how hard is it to create a new order which preserves people's freedoms.
If America goes home China's rise is quickly OVER, without anyone providing global trade security on the open oceans. This would drive unrest internally, and over the last 1500 years when China's central control has been threatened, they have turned inward and become shut ins.
The Belt and Road is partially an attempt to deal with the risk of the US pulling out of providing global security, but they need a LOT more time, and somewhat ironically because of COVID-19 they may have run out. While the US is spending trillions to move away from global trade very very quickly.
Any complex system eventually breaks down. If not this rebellion then the next. Or the one after that.
The system accumulates damage over time, maintenance can't fix everything, eventually it's not worth it to keep it operational. Looking at Trump and Biden I'd say that time is near.
In theory, repair and creating something anew are equivalent processes; at the detail level, they both involve the same act of tearing out old pieces and inserting fresh ones. So I sometimes wonder what is it that eventually makes killing and starting over preferable to maintenance? Maybe we should address that somehow, as redoing things from scratch seem unnecessarily wasteful.
>The unspoken assumption is that there never will be a "real" war with China or Russia or any other 'near peer'.
Yes, because despite Wikipedia saying that the Cold War ended in the 20th century, we still have thousands of nukes ready to launch at each other in five minutes. There may someday be unconventional war, proxy war, or cyber war, but there will not be a great war unless it begins and ends with a nuclear holocaust.
Wouldn't that be nice. Like in StarGate SG-1, where a lot of things in the military budget fronted for the US pax-americaning our galactic neighbourhood and bringing useful tech back.
Alas, I worry that the secret space program is merely the rare not-totally-worthless exception to the overall rule.
The overall rule: most US military spending is utterly wasted to line the pockets of politicians and the military-industrial complex. It's not useful even for defending the country.
The exception: there will most likely be something useful coming out of a space program. May or may not be useful enough to offset the costs, but it's not going to be a complete waste.
Here's an admittedly cynical take: Analysts who suggest that the US is weak better serve the defense industry. Even your source suggests the solution is more money...
I am not sure military supremacy goes hand in hand with economic advantage, eg german and japan are great examples till very recently.
That aside, fundamentally those weapons come in play against whom ? Obviously not most of nato Europe Whom are ideological allies or dependents. can’t be against Russian or China because they have nuclear weapons or even North Korea, India Pakistan. So that leaves South America and the Middle East parts of asia. I guess (and it’s off the top of my head) the value of achieving conventional military supremacy maybe an over kill (no pun) against moderate military powers and not so advantageous against nuclear powers. But at the end I’m not a renowned military strategist, i just observe that German and japan’s influence on the world stage is not backed by a massive conventional military supremacy
The global currency thing is much more down to having the largest economy. The weapons don't matter much for that. I mean Russia has some cool weapons and how many people use rubles globally? The weapons may be worth it for keeping the world kind of peaceful though.
America MUST fight more wars in order to keep the US dollar primacy in world markets.
If it doesn't, and if people switch to another currency (see for example the attempt by Iraq and Libya to create the African Dinar to replace US $), the USA will rapidly become a third-world country.
It is currently over-valued as a nation primarily because of the threat of force it uses to keep its currency in peoples hands.
> huge part of why the dollar is THE global currency.
That is highly questionable.
The doller was half way to be the dominant currency before WW2.
> The dollars for military budget and the dollars raised by a school fundraiser are not even the same currency.
They are actually.
> And we can print dollars, hell we just printed 5 trillion in a couple weeks.
That's true in a narrow sense. When monetary demand changes you increase supply, with that money however you can not simply finance arbitrary expenditure. If monetary demand decreases, the central bank will pull that money back out.
Yet heavens forbid if we spent a little more trying to fix healthcare. This all is thanks to mentality of fear which has deep roots in American consciousness. At the nation level - what if somebody attacks us to at the family level there all kinds of crazies here let’s not let our children play outdoors in the neighborhood without supervision- it’s a fear based society.
The US spends substantially more on health administration than other nations. Removing that administrative burden (ie the private health insurance organizations as arbiters of health care delivery) would substantially lower the cost.
As a percentage of the GDP, the health industry is a larger proportion than military production, but as a percentage of the US Federal budget, the military consumes roughly half.
Covid response was of course badly botched in the US, but look at Germany for comparison to its single-payer neighbors. A decentralised, competitive healthcare industry is worth a lot if push comes to shove.
That said, I agree that the american healthcare market is predatory and has way too high margins. But they are only part of the "problem". Doctors make a lot more money in the US than almost anywhere else, and pharmaceutical companies often get more than half their global revenue from the US market alone.
I suspect you're only counting discretionary spending, when you should be counting all federal government spending, as important programs like Medicare are non-discretionary. Overall, the military is less than 20 percent of federal spending in the US.
The U.S. government spends more on healthcare than the UK government does [1], even though the latter insures all citizens and the former doesn't. The cost of universal healthcare isn't really the issue. The U.S. is spending much more and getting much less.
You see the same thing with the U.S. military. The U.S. spends far more than any other nation on the military, yet look at what happened when Yemen fell apart - the Chinese military evacuated Chinese citizens, the Indian military evacuated Indian citizens, the Pakistani military evacuated Pakistani citizens, and the U.S. government told U.S. citizens that they were on their own[2].
If you think about it, then it’s clear that in free society healthcare will capture all excess money. Essentially you can spend unlimited money on life extension, and people are genetically pre-disposed to fear death. There are some nuances, but essentially healthcare is only going to grow and will continue to be and become overly-dominant sector of US economy. Ironically, if it’s de-regulated, it will capture excess money more effeciently.
Your point is being made as though it's relevant to a healthcare system that exists today anywhere on the planet. It isn't.
It especially isn't related to the US healthcare system, which again, costs the US government - not the US consumer who pays astronomically more then any other developed nation - about twice as much per capita as other developed nations, while providing less services to the public.
Whether or not healthcare might consume all the remaining spending is irrelevant when your system manages to be twice as expensive per capita while excluding tens of millions of people from any coverage at all.
An emergency appendectomy - life saving surgery - costs $15,000[1] unless you manage to find a surgeon who's in your healthcare network, available right then, and you also don't get unlucky enough that anyone in that operating theatre while you're unconscious is also in your healthcare network.
Self-deception. "We live in THE greatest country, ergo what you say can't be true. Also I have ideological stances I'm not willing to consider. QED." - A summery of most conversations I have with about 40% of the US population on healthcare.
This and similar mission are not NASA missions but USSF's missions (United States Space Force), and USFF is part of the United States Armed Forces, different budget:
https://www.epi.org/publication/books_wheremoneygone/: "With appropriate inflation adjustment, it appears that total real education spending per pupil increased by 61% from 1967 to 1991." And that's from 1995. Real expenditures have grown enormously in the last four decades, and the results are to be left as an exercise to the reader.
Did you have a chance to compare US schools to other countries’ schools? By any other standard US schools are lavish. The only reason schools have bake sales to raise funds because of bureaucracy and because parents will pony up anyway.
I cannot help myself thinking, although probably is not comparable:
USD 1 trillion for new fighter
vs.
USD 10 billion for the entire Startlink constellation
In a similar vein as our Carriers, we have 123 military satellites. Since the X-37 is maneuverable and reusable, it might be cheaper in the long run than more satellites.