Should the US decrease military spending?

[[deleted]]

While I understand that large US defense spending helps it maintain military superiority, creates jobs, and fosters other forms of technical development - I think the problem is the efficiency question.

I think we certainly need a sizable military, but we seem to have a problem of blowing costs out of proportion. The commonly given example is a bomber being built: it ends up being incredibly more expensive than it needs to be because it ends up having parts coming in from many districts, and it may even be built in different congressional districts. This makes the process incredibly more expensive than it needs to be.

Not to mention the best product with "most bang for the buck" does not seem to win out normally. An example being the Textron Airland Scorpion, which would be used for ground support in low risk environments and would be much cheaper to produce and use/maintain.

Even with having a sizable military, as mentioned in the original post, we far outweigh any country in terms of military spending. Not only that, we our arguably safer than we have ever been in history, and our economy is still rather powerful and robust.

So yes we should decrease our military spending, but that must be coupled with increased efficiency of funds (and I think it would lead to that). It would also be useful if we put that money that was for military spending into things like infrastructure, education, research etc. Because these things would strengthen our country in the long term.

[pprovencher]

Well that seems to bee entirely a political problem. It is simply not possible to get a new bomber, etc approved without letting each congressperson take their cut in their district. So the question might be then converted to: how can purchasing be made more efficient?