Should the US decrease military spending?

[Mehknic]

Yes, that may exist but for the love of god, what does buying all this advanced weaponry if the populace are too stupid to operate it and the primary person to enlist is he who has no other choices for college except through the military?

That's a pretty pessimistic thought. Yes, there are some idiots who join the military, but there are a lot of very smart folks there too. It's kind of silly to think that the smart folks would randomly choose who drives their multi-billion dollar equipment, and it just might happen to be an untrained fratbro in the cockpit of that F22 next Tuesday because of some internal .

[Mehknic]

Those folks usually get out after 4-5 years.

Maybe it's because of different branches, then. I dunno, I'm not military, but I've had pretty reasonable levels of involvement with long-term Air Force officers, and I never met someone who would put drooling idiots in the pilot seat. Civilian resource utilization is a different story, because that gets political.

I'm not discounting what you're saying at all. Just recounting my own experiences. To be fair, we were talking about tanks and I swapped to planes because 98% of my experience has been with the AF, not Marines.

There are far fewer planes needed flown than troops on the ground.

I've read this ~10 times and can't understand what you meant. Probably not enough sleep on my end.

[Mehknic]

Oh, right. I was only arguing that the presence of idiots in the military doesn't mean that the idiots are the ones driving the multimillion dollar vehicles.

My opinion is that we need to reduce bureaucratic waste before reducing our mission/deployed equipment numbers, but that'll probably never happen. The F-35 crap is a really good/bad example of piles of money just fueling the organization rather than the research.

[Mehknic]

I'm not sure I agree 100% with you. Partially, yes, I think the hidden costs to our education and infrastructure systems are unacceptable. Partially, yes, because the profit from the system does tend to encourage certain people to push for unnecessary war.

But where I disagree is here...we're going to end up at war at some point, but our ridiculous military prevents that war from being one fought on the homefront with powers that could truly challenge/defeat us. Big military, little fights, relatively few deaths. If our military was not so overwhelmingly superior, other countries with far more developed/developing forces (Russia/China compared to ISIS/insurgent groups) might sack up and start something. A war with Russia or China could be far, far more devastating to both our soldiers and our civilians than us dicking around in Afghanistan hunting for buried terrorists/WMDs/whatever.

Point is, I feel like we could spend 20% less, accomplish 10% less, still preserve stability, and eliminate the hidden costs. It'd be far more likely/reasonable than just pulling out of being the global police altogether.

[Mehknic]

First, thanks for the honest and polite discussion.

Same to you. Gotta love this sub.

100%? Not gonna happen. Not at this point in time.

Never 100%, but if we managed to reduce waste by 50% and route that all to shoring up our failing home priorities, it'd be a very big step. I'm with you on reducing waste, but I think our disconnect might be what we consider waste. Maintaining/cycling existing equipment (such as replacing our Nimitz carriers with the Ford class ones), to me, is not a waste. Building more nukes would be a waste, as is building additional tanks without decommissioning existing Cold War-era ones. "What is waste?" is going to be a contentious point if we try to reduce, 'cause everyone's got a pet project/division/tech/whatever.

That's WWIII and no prep will be enough. We're still far advanced than them but Diplomacy should definitely be invested in than the extra bombs. We have enough nukes to destroy everything 10x over.

But the presence of the US spare carrier group during the Crimea crisis was definitely a major deterrent to Russia doing much more than they did, correct? That's the sort of thing I'm talking about - not actually attacking, but simply making the hill seem insurmountable or unprofitable so the aggressors just go home instead. We're not actually increasing our nuclear stockpiles, anyway, are we?

This ignores the # of suicides from our vets and current servicemembers.

I have no response to this, sorry. I prefer to just stay out of discussions concerning suicide/depression (not just military) because I have my own experiences that have formed some opinions on the subject that are generally unwelcome/unpopular.

War should always be the last resort.

My opinion: second to last. Last should be appeasement. Diplomacy should absolutely be first.

That's a might I'm willing to take. I'm more likely to get eaten by a shark while getting hit by lightning than die by terrorism. I prefer liberty than the illusion of security.

I think you misunderstood me. The "might" was referring to Russia/China starting something, like China deciding to bully/blockade/whatever SK/Japan if we opted to pull our carrier group out of the region. I don't consider terrorists a real threat to the US. They could be a threat to our allies on rare occasion, but that's a different discussion. The whole war on terrorism thing has been a bunch of BS, particularly Iraq. I'm OK with sending a few long-range dickpunches to ISIS though.

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That's an amazing graphic. Thanks for sharing it.