U.S. Military Spending vs. The World

[Jcrowley]

U.S. Military Spending

The United States, being the most formidable military power, it is worth looking at their spending.

The U.S. military budget request by the Bush Administration for Fiscal Year 2007 is $462.7 billion. (This includes the Defense Department budget, funding for the Department of Energy (which includes nuclear weapons) and “other” which the source does not define. It does not include other items such as money for the Afghan and Iraq wars—$50 billion for Fiscal Year 2007 and an extra $70 billion for FY 2006, on top of the $50 billion approved by Congress.)

* For Fiscal Year 2006 it was $441.6 billion
* For Fiscal Year 2005 it was $420.7 billion
* For Fiscal Year 2004 it was $399.1 billion PDF formatted document.
* For Fiscal Year 2003 it was $396.1 billion.
* For Fiscal Year 2002 it was $343.2 billion.
* For Fiscal Year 2001 it was $305 billion. And Congress had increased that budget request to $310 billion.
* This was up from approximately $288.8 billion, in 2000.

These figures typically do not include combat figures, so 2001 onwards, the Afghan war, and 2003 onwards, the Iraq war costs are not in this budget. As of early 2006, Congress had already approved an additional funding total of $300 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Chris Hellman, researcher of many of these statistics, also notes, when adjusted for inflation the request for 2007 together with that needed for nuclear weapons the 2007 spending request exceeds the average amount spent by the Pentagon during the Cold War, for a military that is one-third smaller than it was just over a decade ago. PDF formatted document

Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are indeed staggering.

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp#USMilitarySpending

[nam78_two]

1. K&R

Because we are worth it, I guess :sarcasm:

[Jcrowley]

2. Garrisoning the planet

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.

At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases

It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591.5 billion to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.

<snip>

Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced by its own airline -- the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed forces' ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called a C-32A in the Air Force.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=1181

All other issues are hitched to this and still very few politicians will even touch the need to scale back our military.

[The2ndWheel]

4. America exists because of war and conquest

We are the military arm of a global empire. China makes everything. India takes all complaints. African countries supply us with love that lasts forever.

We all contribute.

[nam78_two]

7. Do you know what the name of that documentary is

on the US military industrial complex and how tied it is to our economic system-ok I guess that describes about 20 movies. But, this was supposed to be a particularly good documentary on the subject "The fog of war", "The price of war" something like that maybe? It was on my never ending list of must see documentaries, but now I forget what it was :-/. It was quite acclaimed and I had the name written down somewhere but now I forget exactly where.

[Jcrowley]

9. Sounds like this one

Why We Fight

What are the forces that shape and propel American militarism? This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine.

Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life?

Click Play To View

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8494.htm

And this short animated video says alot in a short time:
War Corporatism: The New Fascism

A video by Simon Robson aka. Knife Party and friend, Barry McNamara. It's an animated look at the dogs of War Corporatism unleashed upon the world by Bush and the PNAC as stated in the September 2000 document Rebuilding America's Defenses.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12017.htm

There is also a video called "Fog of War" but last I checked it wasn't available on the web. You may try again.

[nam78_two]

11. Hey thanks a lot !

Thats the one! Thanks a lot :toast:!

[SanCristobal]

3. Every time someone posts this statistic

a neocon gets his wings.

[Jcrowley]

5. The U.S. war machine is the world's greatest polluter

5. War Pollutes
Bombs, missiles, shells, bullets, and military fuels poison our land, air and water with lead, nitrates, nitrites, hydrocarbons, phosphorous, radioactive debris, corrosive and toxic heavy metals. Unexploded ordnance lies scattered over more than 15 million US acres. The world’s armies are responsible for as much as 10 percent of global air pollution. The 1991 Gulf War generated 80,000 tons of global-warming gases. On any given day, more than 60,000 US troops are engaged in operations or military exercises in about 100 foreign countries. The Pentagon is the world’s largest polluter, generating 750,000 tons of hazardous wastes each year. US military bases have polluted communities in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Greenland, Iceland, Italy, Panama, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain and Turkey. There are more than 14,000 contaminated military sites in US, many located near low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?itemid=596

The U.S. war machine is the world's greatest polluter. As the U.S. Government engages in endless preemptive war, the Pentagon injects the poison of environmental terrorism all over the globe.

The U.S. military generates nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute — 500,000 tons of toxics annually — more than the five leading chemical companies combined.

The 2004 $401 BILLION DoD budget exempts the armed forces from the Endangered Species and Marine Mammals Protection Acts.

Nuclear weapons development at sites such as Hanford,WA, Rocky Flats,CO, and the Nevada Test Site has left a poisonous legacy.

Every year the U.S. military uses enough energy to run all U.S. mass transit for 22 years.

An aircraft carrier uses 150,000 gallons of fuel per day.

A fighter jet consumes as much fuel per hour as the average U.S. motorist uses in two years.

[LSK]

6. and this is all because of some guys with box cutters sent by guys in caves

:eyes:

[bdamomma]

8. and those box cutters guys were not even from Iraq, they were

from George's friends country of Saudi Arabia, again, this is all about the OIL.

[htuttle]

10. We have the most expensive military in the world

It's not the largest -- I'm not even sure in what sense it might be considered 'the best' anymore, but it's DEFINITELY the most expensive. NOBODY pays more for stuff than our military does, and NOBODY pays more for a military than we do.

And that's GOTTA mean something, somewhere. I guess.

[Strelnikov_]

12. "2007 spending request exceeds the average amount spent by the Pentagon . .

during the cold war, for a military that is one-third smaller than it was just over a decade ago."

I was just thinking about this. Thanks for the link.