> Eggheads
...
Anyway, the military is one way of projecting force and power. It's also the most obvious way. But to say it's the only way, or the only way that counts, is very naive.
This [1] 2015 data puts us at 20th of around 150 countries with 3.3% of GDP. And most of the countries high on the list have pretty understandable reasons, like a history of local violence, aggressive neighbors, or in the case of Russia, themselves being aggressive.
The EU together is reasonably comparable to the US in population, GDP, values, and enemies, but is actually closer to most threats, yet they come in as 1.5% of GDP.
The US seems to me to put a rather high allocation toward military spending considering it has no significant enemies in the same hemisphere. None capable of projecting so far logistically.
Then there's also what considering only GDP hides, which is the fact that even if every possible enemy to the US combined, the US net military spending would be significantly greater. And if an existential threat arose and warranted redirecting attention to the military, the US has a great deal of raw capacity it could bring to bear fairly quickly, which combined with having no enemies capable of quickly projecting into the US homeland, means there would likely be little issue ramping up in time for any crisis.
In other words, I'd be curious to hear a justification for the US military expenditure not being unreasonable, because it seems to me it could be less than half what it is, and still leave the country totally secure against foreign threats.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...
The US, on the other hand, has carrier groups that each have as much military power as many moderately sized nations. And we have ten of them stationed all over the world pretty much all the time. The difference is orders of magnitude.
Your point is diminished, not enhanced, by your pejoratives.