How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan
reuters.com
reuters.com
EDIT: I hope everyone realizes this is sarcastic. We already spend more than China and then some.
It won't with China, because China isn't playing the force projecting world superpower game like the SU was.
NATO countries are much more industrialized than China (the same applied when the SU was the opponent), so that certainly helps.
We already waste too much money in the United States trying to be the world police, and there's no good reason for it any more. We have too many of our own problems to deal with to waste so much money on that crap.
The notion that the US military has been a force of good for the world needs to be abandoned. It serves only to encourage the US to attack more countries, as killing millions more Asians would be viewed as the more moral option than allowing Chinese influence to spread.
America, every European colonial power, Britian, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Japan have each had their share of atrocities where they were unchallenged superpowers.
There's a lot to be said for multipolarity.
Additionally, I'd point out the US funds ~1/4 of the UN (China next at ~1/10). Which seems pretty generous to maintaining internal order in a broad way.
For me this is a resounding signal the PLA is predominantly a domestic force. American Presidents do not sack Admirals that easily, because the American admirals are more powerful on the seas than domestic policy or DC.
I am not discounting the improvements in Chinese firepower, esp. their missiles targeting carriers. This article does not have anything substantial to say, China is a military Titan.
China may escalate certain issues to divert the attention of people especially if their economy has a hard landing. Its a risk, but we all know it.
Translation: they need even more money.
For another thing, many expenditures are mandatory rather than discretionary, for good reason. Peoples' social security checks shouldn't vary from year-to-year based on government finances. That doesn't mean that social security spending should be ignored when you're looking at the percentage of government spending that goes to the military.
Total government expenditures in the U.S. is $7.65 trillion. The military budget is less than 8% of that. We're on the higher side, but that's less than for example India or Singapore. As a percentage of GDP we're at 3.1%, which is again on the high side but not crazy out of line. France is at 2.3%, and the NATO target for Europe is 2%. In the early 1990s, France and UK were spending the same percentage of GDP as the U.S. is spending now (over 3%). I remember people talking about Seinfeld and Friends back then, but not about how the U.K. and France were crazy out-of-control with their military spending.
> For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing
And "Defense" is a weasel qualifier that attempts to make military spending look artificially necessary. Most military expenditures are not for defensive purposes.
Most people agree the government should also be providing some type of insurance i.e. social safety net.(social security, medicare)
Also where are you getting the 7.65 trillion number from? Most numbers I've seen were close to 4 trillion
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
7.65 is Fed + State + Local.
It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. Considering pensions paid to veterans a part of military spending is the norm, e.g. NATO's % GDP numbers take that into account for all its members.
> For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing[..]
Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary. It's mostly a political decision to keep spending more today as a percentage of GDP than the US was doing in the 1930s[1], or to name an example closer to the current day more than was being spent on September 10th, 2001.
1. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1792_201...
So? When you're talking about how the military budget is too big, how does it make sense to exclude all the mandatory social spending from the calculation?
> Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary.
That's not the point. Because defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do, looking only at the federal budget will always make defense spending seem artificially large. You see people say stuff like "the U.S. spends more on defense than education!" In fact, we spend more on K-12 alone than defense--it's just that the education spending shows up in the $3.5 trillion of non-federal spending. We spend almost as much on infrastructure as on the military, a fact that is again obscured if you're looking only at the federal budget.
I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong, because that part of the budget is meaningfully broken down into discretionary and non-discretionary spending. You can decide to scale active military personnel up and down, you can't (as easily) decide to stop paying military pensions.
> [...]defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do[...]
So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task.
In the above, the "discretionary" qualifier is being applied to "federal spending" not "military spending."
> So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task.
The upstream comment is arguing that too much is being spent on defense by pointing to defense spending being a high percentage of discretionary federal spending. It is meaningful to discuss whether too much is being spent on the military. But it's misleading to make that argument by pointing out that the part of the government that's meant to provide for defense (and little else) spends a large fraction of its budget on defense.
It's like the statement that "44% of Americans pay no federal income tax." That statement is technically true, but calculated to mislead because it ignores that most of the total tax burden is not "federal income tax." Likewise, more than 80% of total governmental spending is not "federal discretionary spending."
The United States spent $609 billion on defense last year. Surely it's possible to make the case for DOD cutbacks without misleading statistics.
Seriously this bad naming needs to stop.
Meta comment: wonder if my comment will get downvoted too when it's just asking a question meant to start an intelligent discussion.
It's all too easy to declare votes are for whatever reason you want to think they are.
This ensures that HN provides a semi-curated discussion weighted towards technical and scientific issues, and against geopolitical or socioeconomic topics, for example.
That isn't a statement that these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that they aren't necessarily appropriate for discussion here.
You mean, the forum software itself? Who wrote the algorithm?
Is America really so scared of being number 2?
I mean, its literally impossible to be number 1, if the competition is investing in their people and aren't going to insane wars.
America is still number 2 and that's not a bad place.
A life of $10/day with dirt cheap healthcare or a life of $60/day with the constant fear of losing healthcare.
This is why PPP comparison matters.
China isn't so much rising, as they are preparing for the inevitable collapse of the US Empire.
As China's prominence or output rise, it makes sense coverage would rise too.
It also makes sense that as China has more impact on the world, it will naturally affect the interests of a greater number of people. This in turn, means more people have a stake in something China is or isn't doing.
Also, the media and conversations towards China haven't been less than provocative. Your stance of China being more visible because they now have more impact is accurate. It's more humble, more like a true winner, a true sport who was number 1 for many years but accepts there's another game in town.
But unfortunately, we're seeing more catty behavior than mature winner behavior
All of them would be.