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Originally Posted by PiKA2001
And they do, but the question of how much should we cut always comes into play. The U.S. military has a much smaller footprint now then we had during the Cold War, but the fact that a current gen fighter jet or Navy ship costs about 8x more to develop and build today then it did 30 years ago negates any sort of cost savings there.
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But you recall when there was a big to do about cutting old planes from the budget that no one uses anymore? The military didn't want them but Boeing(?) and others fought to keep them in the budget. I think there's more obvious fat there then we give credit for, but the congressmen and senators from those states don't want to lose the business. I get that, but that's not a good way to budget military money.
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Originally Posted by PiKA2001
I've heard speculation that China's military spending is slated to exceed the U.S.'s within 15 years.
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Possible, but that's a HUGE step. If, per Mother Jones' analysis our overrun is about 15% of our budget, then we spend 20x China does on the military (not including Homeland Security, classified intelligence budgets, or Veteran's Affairs.) That's beyond huge. I wonder what numbers are being used. The Mother Jones analysis points out that the official budget is around 500 billion but Congress authorizes another 300+billion on top of that. We're closer to 1trillion on defense spending than anyone would like to be I think.
This article states that China's growth is about 10% a year although this year it was only about 7.5%. Even arguing that it's really at least 10% a year, they couldn't come close to us. Is China big bunch of liars? Well that's possible too I suppose.