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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

I was with you on the first sentence.. but where did you get 7.8%? We only spend 3.5%. [Edit: World bank puts it at 3.1: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...]

And according to the military, most of this higher than average spending is due to the military being voluntary, and needing to compete on wages in one of the highest earning countries in the world. Whether you agree with the military's assessment or not, it's true that a significant portion of US military spending is spent on wages/compensation. A lot (not all though) of the difference between the US and russia/china is due to the later having much cheaper labor.

Also the last sentence certainly isn't true... there are many countries that spend far more a percent of GDP on their military: Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the typical example of military excess: north korea.

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It's really hard to get a precise number of how much money we spend on military. The budget for the military is snuck into other line items and obscures the true cost. For instance the VA is not included, even though we only need the VA due to having veterans. And the costs for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are included in the Department of Energy's budget.

The VA is a weird case — if we had comprehensive medical coverage for all Americans, the because-of-military costs would only be those incurred due to care for wounded veterans.

I believe that's a minority of the VA's expenditures, but sometimes it is hard to separate. For example, my grandfather receives a hearing aid from the VA — is that because of too much time spent around jet planes, or just due to age?

He probably receives a hearing aid from the VA because he was in the military, irregardless of how he lost his hearing.

The point they are raising is whether that's a negative externality of the military - had he not been in the military, would that hearing aide not have been needed.

If he had not been in the military, the VA wouldn't have given him one.

It's not uncommon in countries with comprehensive health care for veterans to receive additional benefits (even for non combat/service related injuries).

But you're right that much of the VA could be replaced with a national system.

Without a doubt, but as it stands now, it's part of the total compensation package that is offered to service members and should be accounted as such.

It's not appropriate to include in terms of proportion of GDP because they'd be spending that money on healthcare anyway.

It still is appropriate because it's compensation for a job. VA benefits are part of the package deal a service member signs up for. Without those benefits the military would have to offer a higher salary to recruit the same number and quality of employees, at the margin at least.

It's like saying a government pension shouldn't be counted as part of the cost of employing government workers because the workers would still have to buy food and housing whether or not their career was with the government.

By that logic you could affect the spending numbers by charging military spouses rent and making up for it with daycare pay to compensate them for watching their kids. It's just a difference in accounting.

I'm confused about what you're arguing. If governmental funds are being spent on military spousal housing, that's a cost of the military, whether it's accounted as salary to the service member who pays rent or if the military builds the house directly.

My original point is that nobody (at least publicly) knows the true spending on the US military because the accounting is so baroque. The VA is just one agency whose rather significant cost is typically forgotten when quoting these numbers, but it's far from the only example.

That might have been a bad example. But if you're comparing military spending between one country with the VA and another with universal health coverage, it will mess with the numbers if you include the VA. It's the other country with the difficult accounting.

Ah, I see what you're saying.

But I don't want to compare countries. I'm not sure if there's a "right" level of military spending, but I think pro-Military-Industrial-Complex forces in the US purposefully obscure the cost in order to not erode popular support.

> It's really hard to get a precise number of how much money we spend on military.

Not as hard as it is to get a precise number on much money China spends on its military.

China's soldier support spending is pretty significant as well, probably much more so than the US.

according this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War, the direct spending of DoD on Iraq war is about $757.8 billion, do you think most of that spending on the labor?

I think to look at any particular war and ask that question leads to an inaccurate answer... since there are years of prep work, training, research, etc that the military conducts, then in a short period of time they expend equipment, munitions, etc during a war.

But consider, the cost of labor effects everything the military does... Everyone in the entire chain commands a higher wage than they would in China/Russia, whether they hold a gun or not... researchers, assembly line workers, doctors, etc... pushing up the costs of everything the military buys.

I agree part of your point. But you forgot another huge difference that, US has involved lots of wars in the past three decades, but China didn't, which spend trillion dollars, either on labor or not, but that money just wasted without any outcoming. You can check out what Jack Ma commented about this in World Economic Forum 2017: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/jack-ma-america-has-w...

Wasted perhaps in immediate strategic outcomes. But don't discount blooding troops, burning in systems and building institutional knowledge, which are strategic assets. One can certainly argue if it was worth it, though.

Yep, you have to employ a lot of people to maintain military occupations in an ever-growing list of countries. Clearly we should cut benefits.

We could cut the size of the military... but simply making the observation that we have a large number of people doesn't explain anything. China's military is 2x the size of the US by number of people.

It certainly doesn't follow that the richer and more valuable a country becomes (and therefore more expensive personnel), the smaller their military should be.

> China's military is 2x the size of the US by number of people.

And yet china has ~4.5x the number of people as the US.

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