This blog post originated when I asked myself a simple question after a debate.
When people debate about military spending, the debate almost always boils down to "should we cut military and risk terrorists having better access, or should we bolster military spending even more."
To this end, I wondered...
How much could we cut military spending and still be safe? It's a valid question. At what point of military spending, be it more or less than what we're currently spending, would we be safe?
I set out to find an answer. Note, this is my answer. There are likely things I have not considered, but I did the best I was inclined to.
The answer was very, very surprising.
First off, in addition to being a military might, the U.S. is an economic superpower. For that reason alone, most of the countries of the world are U.S. allies. The U.S. is also part of several major powerful alliances. As such, we'll only focus on the list of U.S. enemies.
This turns out to be a very short list:
Cuba
Iran
North Korea
There's a few that are questionable as well, depending on how future politics go. These are:
Syria
Venezuela
Burma
Egypt
These are enemies and potential enemies. That is very different from being a competitor. (A competitor competes with us, but also has multiple treaties and alliances with us. In short, we struggle with eachother over economic issues, but generally treat eachother well. Kind of like competeing sports stars, they play by the rules of the game instead of resorting to violence for their differences. For example, although both sides talk a big storm, China is actually one of our best allies, with huge economic ties between the two countries, both would falter and struggle without the other. We're just too intertwined at this point.
Now, comparing these nations, here's each country's military spending:
- U.S. (for comparison): 1 Trillion, 753 Billion.
- Burma ~ 2.5 Billion
- Cuba: ~1.8 Billion
- Egypt: 4.420 Billion
- Iran: 6.297 Billion
- North Korea: ~ 1.9 Billion
- Syria: 2.236 Billion
- Venezuela: 3.106 Billion
Our military would have to spend....
22.259 Billion.... or 1.2% of its current size.
Yea, you heard me right.... we could literally cut out 98.6% of our military spending, and be able to take on all of our enemies at once!
However, maybe I'm being too extreme. That's assuming we're meeting on an even playing field. That's forgetting two minor details:
 |
| I mean... surely nearly half the Earth's surface is no biggie, right? |
We kind of have oceans on two sides. For us to be safe, we only have to worry about a defensive war. That means THEY have to come to US.
Using an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer as a model: ~ 8000 tons each, that takes 24 barrels/hr[1] (1000 gallons of fuel an hour) with a speed of about 30 knots (~35 mph) and current prices per barrel of crude ~ $100. This means for each ton it costs about $12.5 per 35 miles per ton.
A single Abrams tank is 61.3 tons. So a tank (ignoring the ship itself, just the tank's costs... lets say they were patient and strapped an engine onto each tank and gave it life preservers instead of wasting money on a navy) it costs $21/mile to transport it (assuming that by some amazing feat of engineering, they're running off of pure crude oil).
Let's calculate the cost of a war in "per tank" values.
- U.S. (for comparison): $0 (they're already here)
- Burma: 8300 miles away - $174,300 per tank
- Cuba: 300 miles away - $6,300 per tank
- Egypt: 6,800 miles away - $142,800 per tank
- Iran: 7,300 miles away - $153,300 per tank
- North Korea: 6,000 miles away - $126,000 per tank
- Syria: 7,000 miles away - $147,000 per tank
- Venezuela: 1,600 miles away - $33,600 per tank.
Also, multi-front wars are rare. Usually it's a one-on-one.
So lets go by nation... who can land the most tanks on U.S. soil if they devoted their ENTIRE military budget to attacking us, leaving themselves open to the rest of the world, sending their ships by powered life-rafts, manned completely with fanatics who don't ask for pay and are willing to eat ramen the whole trip...
- U.S. (for comparison): 292,166 tanks
- Burma: 405 tanks
- Cuba: 299 tanks
- Egypt: 719 tanks
- Iran: 1023 tanks
- North Korea: 310 tanks
- Syria: 363 tanks
- Venezuela: 514 tanks
Running tally, at this point, we're down to only needing to spend 21.8 Billion to take on everyone at once. However, if we're only concerned about one enemy at a time, we only need 6 Billion in spending....
So, you might think that was it, right? Our military needs to spend $6 Billion to stay in good enough shape, right? Wrong.
Economically speaking, Americans are crazy. We live in one of the safest nations in the world, with the biggest military in the world. Yet we buy guns. We buy guns like children in other countries buy candy.
The US generates $5.1 Billion in taxes from gun sales in a year.[2] That's not the total gun sales along, that's just the taxes. That alone is almost enough to take on our biggest enemy if that's was what we spent on guns and not just the taxes from it. If the FBI requests for background checks based on guns alone was any indication (ignoring all the gun purchases without background checks) the American populous military spending isn't small. Calculating just using guns, ignoring used guns[3], using the average price of $1000 per gun - some are cheaper like handguns, some more expensive like rifles and semi-automatics; we cash in at a value of $15.3 Billion+. That's ignoring local and state cops and state militias, I might point out as well (which tacks on at least another ~ $244 Billion [4]).
The final end result...
American citizens could handle our 4 top enemies combined in full-scale war (very unlikely to happen) and come out on top. You throw in the police, and we could beat them more than 10 times over. There's no need for the military for our national defense.
TL;DR In short, we could cut military spending by 100% and be fine.
[1] http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-09/fyi-what-kind-gas-mileage-can-you-get-naval-warship
[2] http://business.time.com/2012/12/18/americas-gun-economy-by-the-numbers/
[3] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/02/on-the-relative-size-of-the-police-and-the-civilian-firearms-markets-2572408.html
[4] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending
(FYI, most statistics for this article not otherwise stated were compiled from Wikipedia, the CIA world factbook, and Google instant facts)
