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Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

Today's US Army is dwarfed by the size of the Vietnam-era Army. I love putting this into perspective for people who don't know the history. Those 5,500+ losses would be more than the Army's entire helicopter fleet today; active and reserve components combined. 300+ losses would be huge, like half of the current Apache fleet. I'm not sure that we ever had more than 300 helicopters in Iraq or Afghanistan, even at the peak of the 2007-2010 surges.

The co-pilot/gunner actually sits in the front seat of the Apache, by the way.

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Thanks, I figured but do you know just how much larger? I am listening to Ken Burns' Vietnam on Audible and I believe we had 200K personnel in Vietnam at the peak... oh shit I just double checked and it was 543K personnel JUST IN VIETNAM. Thanks, mang! Enlightening. That is 25% of our entire military today.

Yeah, at the peak of Vietnam we had more troops on the ground than the Army has on active duty today (about 450k). The Army's size declined by half after Vietnam, and then declined by half again in the 1990s. This is a nice figure illustrating active duty end-strength for all services since 1950: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/gov310/media/fad_milper_400.gif

That figure doesn't go back as far as WWII, of course. Even the Korea and Vietnam-era Army would be dwarfed by the WWII Army: 8 million troops in 1945.

Note that we do also have the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, which effectively doubles the total Army end-strength to about 1 million today.

As a career Army officer, I could go on about this, and what it means, and what worries me, all day.

My question is... we still spend a ton on defense. How did the budget change?

At first, there were real budget cuts (the "peace dividend") of about 10%. Over time, total spending grew to be much more in both nominal and real terms, and much more per troop. However, it's also much lower as a percentage of GDP, from a high of 9-10% in 1968 to 3-4% today.

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