Comment by 3688346844 4 days ago
Any talk that assumes the US defense budget is massive is silly. It's approx 12% of the federal budget and 3.4% of the nation's GDP. It seems large because the US is rich and it seems large compare to the EU because most of the EU, besides Poland, decided it was a lot cheaper to have a token force and leave the real work to the Americans.
Using the left-hand list here as a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
It takes all nine of the top 10 countries besides America (#1) to finally match and exceed the American defence budget. Of those nine, only two (Germany and France) are EU members.
In a word, the American defence budget is fucking massive and we certainly don't need anywhere even remotely most of it for ourselves.
You’re missing the parent’s point. It’s large in absolute terms but not as a percentage of GDP (3.5%). And for countries spending less, once again the point is that they’d rather spend less and lean on the US when things really hit the fan (see: European countries not chipping in the requisite 2% of GDP for NATO funding; roughly half of that “OMG so massive” US military spending goes towards NATO).
Edit: yes my bad, I was meaning this comment for another poster in the thread.
...But that's exactly what I'm saying?
Seriously. You just more or less repeated what I've been saying, minus the potentially spiteful sentiment.
From my original comment:
>The reason the US defence budget is so sky-fucking-high is because we effectively pay for everyone's military, though.
Size of the budget is all in the eye of the beholder though. I don't think its unreasonable for someone to see 12% of the total budget going to defense as massive, especially when the country isn't actively at war.