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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
The whole military spending thing is a bit misleading. There are no rivals to U.S.-NATO military spending. Not even close. The U.S. spends 3x as much as China and Russia put together. NATO Europe spends $240 billion a year on defence. Russia spends $47 billion. The UK alone ($55 billion) exceeds Russia in spending.
American politicians won't admit it, but one of the reasons for their massive military spending is as a government subsidy to key industries, and to divvy out pork barrel spending to congressional districts. The reason they spend so much has nothing to do with protecting other countries.
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Its by the way Cliff easy to make statements like this however its with a misunderstanding of the mission that each Military has to take.
The US Military is the most global of all the militaries in the world. The American Military was designed to fight 2 major ground wars, a holding action and multiple peace keeping missions at the same time. As well they due to a lot of treaty obligations have bases on every continents and fleets and air force assets in nearly every body of water. So of course their military spending is high. Because their mission is unique and huge and diverse and complex.
Russia doesn't have the same mission. They're concerned simply with the defense of Russia and their coast line. The movement into Syria represents a change for them and its likely that they're getting paid by Syria. China defends their nation and their one coast line, they do very little on an international scale. They have what is mainly a frigate navy that doesn't really have the ability to project power. But they're spending nearly half of what the US is spending and most of that is on changing their military to aggressively project power in their part of the world.
Also you can't merely say that the NATO nations are outspending Russia and expecting that suddenly NATO is going to have the military strength or assets on the ground to stop the Russia's from pounding Eastern Europe. Those nations combined might spend $240 billion, however very little of that goes to NATO in terms of equipment or men or currently even training time.
Probably if America did say screw it, we're bringing all of our troops home, we're going to concentrate our spending on the defense of America and we will not deploy for NATO or anyone else. We're going to bring home our navies in the Indian Ocean and the Med and the Seas off of Japan and leave the defense of those to those local countries. Oh and if anyone attacks the American mainland we have 5000 nukes that we're not afraid to use as part of our primary offensive strategy. They could certainly shorten supply lines and do what China and Russia do which is have less troops that they lavishly spend on they could probably cut their defense budget significantly.
However it wouldn't take long for Chaos to break out in the areas that America would abandon.