> How, in your view, does spending 25% of a budget on salaries explain a budget that's higher than the next nine countries combined?

America’s win two wars doctrine absolutely mandates the largest military in the world. Not sure how the comment you’re replying to even contemplates challenging that. But if America paid Chinese wages, its budget at all levels would be smaller. We pay more for every soldier, bullet and missile because Americans are better paid.

On the contrary: how does spending more than the next nine countries, all of which have totally unique geopolitical positions and defense needs, have anything whatsoever to do with what we need to spend to achieve our goals? It's like saying Walmart spends more on inventory than the next 9 retailers combined: Walmart has a totally different business than Nike and GAP. In fact it's even more asinine than that: it's like saying that Walmart spends more than the biggest retailers in India and China, countries with different currencies, where quality differs, and where things cost different amounts.

But anyway. Suppose we spent only as much as China does, the #2 defense spender. They spent $229 billion. They also don't really value human life, soldiers are expendable in vast quantities if it advances the aim of the state--loss of life is much less tolerable in America. Do you think that would be sufficient for the US defense goals? We currently spent $173B just on salaries for servicemen, and then another $286 billion on operations, followed by $141 billion for procurement and $106 billion for research and development. Yes there is waste in the military, but is there $450 billion worth of waste and cruft? Are we to believe that are leaders and generals have miscalculated by more than 50%? Should we fire half our soldiers, scuttle our carrier strike groups, and abandon efforts to modernize the air force?

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

- Eisenhower

You really ought to read the original comment you replied to again - their point about unnecessary arms races seems to have triggered some kind of automatic defense in your brain.

Yes, it is an unfortunate reality of the world we live in, which some people choose to blissfully ignore. Go ahead and ask the Ukrainians how their hospitals and children are doing these days. Since we're playing recite-quotes, here's one: To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. - George Washington