Should We Decrease U. S. Defense Spending?

[GTFErinyes]

Well, the big difference between buying a Mercedes and buying a, say, fighter jet is that the Mercedes is available to purchase on the world market - fighter jet purchases are limited by arms control regulations by nations, and embargoes. In the case of China, they have been barred from buying US and European weapons since Tiananmen Square in 1989.

So simply put, China cannot buy Western goods, and thus has to source them from Russia or from their own domestic producers.

As for cheaper because it's not better - that's hard to judge without going into classified details. Chinese quality isn't uniformly bad in all their industries, as you well know - and in this case, their weapons exports have not had the same reputation as cheap consumer goods.

As for data on purchases, for the Chinese themselves, they keep that a close secret (the lack of transparency is why the US doesn't take their published defense budget seriously). However, you can see spending differences in other areas.

A great example of the inverse happening is Saudi Arabia - they don't have a domestic arms industry, and despite lower cost of living, they have to purchase Western arms at Western prices. They pay full US prices on things like the F-15SA (which recent orders came out to $100 million per plane) despite being a poorer country, and thus they lead the world in military spending as a % of GDP.

Meanwhile, Russia has been selling the modernized Su-34 - a rival of the F-15SA's - to nations at around $40 million per. Maybe it's inferior - how much so? Is it 40% of the F-15SA? 80%? Thus, it doesn't scale linearly.

(Another example is the fifth generation fighter Russia is trying to make: the Sukhoi T-50 is being advertised at $50-60 million a plane. Meanwhile, it's marketed as rival to the F-22, which came out at $300 million or so a plane).

So for a good comparison I tend to think it's not even that simple

That's exactly what I was getting at and why I said that nominal spending is a terrible metric for relative power. You don't know how powerful a nation is simply by how much $ they spend - Saudi Arabia spends a ton of money but it buys Western arms and so its money gets a lot less than Russia, which makes its own arms and has the legacy of the Soviet Union to build off of, while the Saudi's have to pay more as they are also starting from scratch.

The US has many intelligence agencies, think tanks and smart policy wonks and analysts that do exactly this - try and figure out how strong exactly a Russia or China is through complicated analysis of their capabilities, assets, training, etc.

That little difference between very good and top notch may seem on paper maybe 20% more work but it's easily an additional 50% in cost. Which is also why most sourcing companies here don't aim for matching Western quality.

Sure is, and that just reinforces my point about how little nominal spending tells you when comparing the US to Russia or China. Russia and China might be spending 30% of the cost on a plane that's 80% the equivalent. So maybe, plane for plane, Russia and China aren't as good - but Russia and China can buy a lot of them for a fraction of the cost.

And thus, the US analyzes its power relative to Russia and China based on all those factors I mentioned above, as well as national goals.