How much of the US military budget is actually worth the money spent?

27 comments

1. I’d say most of it.

   Yes they get overcharged for office supplies and shit, but so does every other government institution.

   The big thing that “inflates” our military budget, which not even most Americans realize, is that unlike most other countries we factor in the cost of benefits, healthcare, education, and other programs into the final total. Elsewhere those costs are rolled into the totals of their civilian equivalents.

2. I wish I knew. I feel pretty confident it could be cut a fair amount with few ill effects. I do think research is important and that takes trial and error, I guess I support trying to stay number one militarily. Ima guess 15% is pure waste lol. Hope there’s an objective way to figure out if I’m close.

3. >The budget is massive but does everyone agree what spending is valuable?

   *(looks at Ukraine)*

   I bet, at the very least, Europe does lol

4. As someone who works in machine shops that make stuff for the military, I have a little bit of insight.

   If you remember there was a story going around about the Navy spending $1000 on a coffee mug. A few years ago I wrote a comment explaining how they got to that price. It is a little bit of hyperbole but it isn’t far from reality and applies to most things.

   >Well you see, the people making the mug could only buy materials from certain places (DFARS compliant country list). If there was a design change, it is a 3 month process to get a rev change to be approved. After a rev change, the mug needs to be qualified again. They had to pay someone extra to make sure the part number that is printed on the bottom conforms to MIL-STD-130 (amazing read, 53 pages on how to put a part number on something). Before they ship the mugs to the navy, the navy needs to send a source inspector to the vendor to make sure all the paperwork is done correctly and the mugs are built to spec. If it is not, they need to fix everything and the source inspector needs to go back again. Then the mugs get damaged in shipping and the navy tries to blame the vendor on spending them bad parts, which leads to 4 months of arguing. Then the navy needs to decide if they want the mugs fixed or replaced. That takes about 2 months. If they want them fixed, the company first needs to send them a plan on how they are going to fix them. If they want them remade, a corrective action needs to be generated and approved.

5. Most of it spend on equipment to fight previous wars, not future Wars.

   Like all our aircraft carriers would be sunk in minutes if we’re in a war with a first world nation. Modern long range offensive weapons are too accurate to have large slow moving targets. They made sense in World War II though

6. If you’re going to do a line-item audit of an $800B+ budget – first of all, good luck – but if you are, it’s no doubt that you’ll find things that are over-bid or over-spent. But big picture? No, I think our military budget is just fine, to keep us the unquestionable superpower of the world. Not just because it’s **us,** but because we are the best, most benign choice.

7. At any given time there are a lot of people who feel we’re spending too much money on one of the following things (and should cut it in favor of the other)

   * Preparing for great power war (blue water navy, tanks, things to kill tanks, planes, things to kill planes)

   * Counter-insurgency/Counter-Terrorism

   I’ve read so many articles about how the military ‘wastes’ billions of dollars preparing for land war in Europe because it will never happen again!

8. The US military is the world’s largest jobs program. The budget makes more sense when you look at it from that frame.

9. I’m not an expert, but the top reply on https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/71bq8h/cmv_the_military_budget_of_the_us_is is.

   It’s long, but since you’ve got enough interest to ask this question in the first place, it’s worth the read. It’s 5 years old, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find both funding and military goals have changed significantly given the war in Ukraine, but it’s still relevant.

   If you don’t want to read it, the TLDR is that, given the very large goals set for the US military and the expense of US labor, costs are reasonable.

10. The budget is expected to fund a force capable of fight simultaneous wars against two peer/near peer adversaries and a regional power. Whether or not that is a necessary ask is debatable but for the goal we spend a reasonable amount of money.

11. The largest portion of it is wages to the employees iirc.

12. half-ish? All government agencies have bureaucratic processes to justify the existence of people hired to enforce the processes. I know when I send out proposals to any government entity I do my calculation on time needed for the design, and then double my fee.

13. I don’t think many people on reddit or otherwise are going to claim the Pentagon are usually good stewards of our money but that doesn’t make the spending any less necessary. We all hear stories of the $1000 coffee mug or the $90 bolt. If you’re old enough, you may recall our F-35 program which spent years in purgatory and seemed at the time to be a boondoggle of massive proportions. Now it looks like we’ve got a do all fighter jet of the future and every other country wants it, badly. My point being, it’s hard to tell in the moment which “wasteful” project will pan out and which won’t.

14. The US military is actually pretty useful for the world.

    People are mad at us when we do stuff like invade Iraq, Which was unquestionably bad.

    But in the last decade we’ve pulled back and readjusted for the purpose of defending our allies.

    And this is the cornerstone of global trade and security.

    Mess with Costa Rica or Finland, and you about to get a hot dose of freedom.

15. What looks wasteful in peacetime can become invaluable in wartime.

16. I worked for the military. Yes, absolutely there is excessive wasteful spending. There were different pots of money for different purposes. One pot would have way too much, another not near enough, and we couldn’t transfer it around without very complex red tape that was way above my paygrade. It was incredibly frustrating.

17. I’d say 80%, which is much higher than the spending of literally any other government entity.

18. Looking at all the universities and companies employing millions of people and many of the technological advancements including the internet and GPS, I’d say it’s very much well worth it.

    Yeah, there’s plenty of waste, but the money put into R&D has paid dividends.

19. One of the things that plagues the military is the necessity to spend. If they don’t use the money in their budget then it gets slashed for the next fiscal year. On top of that some of it has to be blamed on subcontractors. I worked for one that overpaid on everything that you could buy from Walmart that for half the price, then charge the government 25% mark up. On top of that then you have the fact that the budget spends a lot on maintenance and overhead/admin. Lastly it’s still not that high relative to the overall budget when all of that is taken into account

20. The navy is most important. A well policed (in both the military and constabulary sense) ocean is like a nuclear fuel rod. It keeps conflict from spreading. One reason for world war II, and the eighteenth century world wars is that there was no naval dominance, and one reason why all conflict was local in the nineteenth century is that there was. Furthermore the navy provides a massive mobile source that can be first on the scene in any disaster including natural ones. Finally it guards traffic; there would be more starvation than there is if shipping could not get through.

    The main reason for the army is to provide a force in being. In retrospect I underestimated it’s importance. We would not be able to dump widgets on Ukraine if the army had not amassed widgets first.

    We do get kind of carried away with our gageteering though, and more money should go to training. Also our chief vulnerability is erratic voters which means we better drill down on state to take more careful looks at our commitments. Fighting for another “our son of a female canine” is demoralizing. In fact the chief reform probably should be in policy not the military.

21. All of it.

    Si vis pacem, para bellum.

22. All of it! World war champs back to back, baby!! *airhorn noises*

23. A lot of it is likely inflated military contracts, its part of what makes the military industrial complex go round.

24. It’s maybe……… 75 / 25. I’d say 75% is well spent, and necessary, and 25% poorly spent. We have some programs that, quite honestly, need to be scrapped. Just thrown straight out, defunded, maybe even try to claw back some of what went to the contractors involved.

    That said, we have a lot of weapons systems, equipment, facilities, bases, and R&D that are necessary. And payroll, for troops and civilians. And a ton other expenses that are all legit and needed.

25. The fact that most of us go to bed at night not worrying about whether we might be invaded by a foreign power is pretty worth it, IMO.

26. You could probably cut like 10%-20% with no efficacy loss.

    We really need to tweak the “use it or lose” aspect of budgeting at the unit layer.

    Also MIC supply chains are incestuous and pretty stupid in a lot of cases.

    Plus that time 2.3 trillion disappeared or “unaccounted for” around 9/11 means theres either or both bureaucratic waste and incompetance and several million tons of greasy palms.

27. Considering the ROI, I’d say all of it. North America will never be invaded or have territory encroached upon, and the seas are mostly safe, due to our navy. It’s a good investment.