Considering how much we spend on the military, Rest of the goverment combined sounds like the bare minimum.
It was going to be 100 billion/year cut if we'd gone over the fiscal cliff. FWIW there's alot that needs to be done to how the military spends money beyond cutting it. It's legislated to be anticompetitive and follows a business-first plan that just shovels money into bottomless pits, and gets literally forced by Congress to buy stuff the military doesn't want to buy to begin with.
Cut cut cut, I say. If our military were much smaller, we would be more likely to stay out of other countries' business and also more able to take care of our own problems.
You're not really listening @KnightWriter The system itself is broken beyond just cutting being a solution.
I don't suppose it'd do any good to point out that 20 years ago the military was twice as large and spending slightly more than half as much? But yes, clearly cutting is the only answer. /s
Uh, technology has advanced quite a bit in the last 20 years. Less personnel can do more (to a point, obviously)-- drones, for example. Plus, inflation, Cold War's over, blah blah. I'm no fan of the military budget. We could cut hundreds of billions and still be the most powerful military on the planet. Yes, bottomless pits and the military-industrial complex are huge problems, but they're far more difficult to address than the raw dollar numbers.
Except that as far as the military is concerned, it hasn't. Particularly the Army. We've adopted two new vehicle systems in the last ten years-Stryker and MRAP; neither is really "new" beyond that the Army never used either beforehand. We're still going around with a rifle that was new when the Vietnam War was still a thing and a lineup of armored vehicles developed in the 1970s and adopted in the 1980s. There's been alot of spending but it hasn't really gotten us a pile of new technology. The MICC is going to have to be addressed sooner or later. It's a toxic nightmare that simply cutting funding isn't going to address-even under the vastly diminished Clinton budgets alot of it was still going to Congressmembers' pet projects that never went anywhere.
Ka'plah! The Federation would have trembled this day! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Bird_of_Prey
FWIW, alot of DARPA programs do draw from science fiction; Starship Troopers and Predator being the main ones, seemingly. F-22: The F-15 is no longer a top of the line fighter. It needs replacement and has for years. F-35: Has been a mess, mainly due to the joint nature of the program. Ballistic Missile Defense: Yeah, no argument there.
Does it give you no pause that our military is such a gargantuan monstrosity that it can endure such cuts? Any other department of the federal government would have obscenely negative balances if anything of the sort were even remotely tried.
I think I've made it clear that I'm not opposed to reforming military spending. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Defence cuts for their own sake? How much does the US military contribute back to the US economy by comparison though?
Oh, only about 140 billion annually from weapons purchases. That's not counting gasoline or any of the tawdry office supplies we buy in state-sized amounts.
I'm not sure there's an especially high rate of return, actually. Yes, it is obviously economically important, but only because it represents a large employer and a substantial source of demand for man other manufacturers and companies in the service industry. It would seem at first blush that any number of departments could achieve the same if one chose to throw enough money at them. I'm not aware of anything intrinsic to defense spending that makes it any more of a GDP multiplier than all the other parts of government spending.
