US Foreign Policy Trump47 | Threatens all hell to break loose in Gaza; won't rule out military force in Panama, Greenland, threatens economic force

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 271
  • Views: 6K
  • Politics 
finesse said:
Other than you're equating NATO spending with their entire defense spending and that you're ignoring how much more of the world we're spending that money on than NATO is, and you're making real sense. I expect we're getting good value for that money when it comes to the Ukraine and NATO.

The problem is that it's the money to private contractors, sweetheart deals for constituents and things that most need to be cut that are the most likely to be hands off.
Click to expand...
I certainly mentioned that our defense spending includes non-nato commitments before in this thread so not sure how I'm ignoring it.

I'm sure there are plenty of sweetheart deals but if we're talking cutting hundreds of billions from the defense budget, it's going to be more than those little set-asides. We have to make the decision to roll back our defense commitments or we're going to keep spending at this level.

But no one, including you, wants to make those hard choices. It's all about cutting waste and there's just not enough of that.

So make a hard choice. Show some guts instead of the politician 's favorite strategy of claiming we're going to cut waste or administrative bloat when it won't make too much difference. If it's cuts for defense spending, cuts in entitlements, more taxes or more debt, which are you going to go with? And if it is defense spending, what commitments are you willing to lapse to allow us to reduce that spending?
 
I'd start with mothballing half the carrier groups, stopping any future contracts on more, put more focus on smaller craft and phasing out future development of manned combat aircraft. and get rid of the older ones as fast as is expedient.

I'd also cut aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia and a few other non NATO countries. I'm not sure why we are spending the money we are in Ethiopia. Then we can evaluate how top heavy we are with officers.
 
finesse said:
I'd start with mothballing half the carrier groups, stopping any future contracts on more, put more focus on smaller craft and phasing out future development of manned combat aircraft. and get rid of the older ones as fast as is expedient.

I'd also cut aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia and a few other non NATO countries. I'm not sure why we are spending the money we are in Ethiopia. Then we can evaluate how top heavy we are with officers.
Click to expand...
Okay. That takes some guts. Carriers have a maintenance cost of about 3 billion per year per carrier. Mothball half of them and you might get to $18 billion in cost savings.

Us foreign aid to Israel is a little less than 4 billion but us foreign aid to Saudi Arabia is nominal at about 3 million per year although that carrier near the Persian Gulf cost a few billion a year to operate. Not sure if that's included in your mothballed fleets.

The US has 1.3 million active duty soldiers and 18% of them are officers. Their average salary is $62,000 per year but call it $100,000 per year with benefits. That's 23.4 billion in personnel cost for officers. You didn't say how many you'd want to cut but say it's 25% and you just saved yourself about 8 billion.

So you've just cut about $30 billion per year. You've got a ways to go but you have to start somewhere. We're going to find out if we need those carriers and officers, but I think you've made a good start. What else are you going to do?
 
Last edited:
Preferably leave it to someone who understands this. It's not something I've studied. I can see some obvious trends and understand a little about how much pork barrel spending there is but if you want more you need somebody who knows more.
 
It doesn't have to all come from spending cuts. We have to find a way to make Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to pay a LOT more taxes. Maybe special confiscatory rules for naturalized citizens and non-citizens to pay back this country for the wealth they were privileged to accumulate here.

If we can have special immigration rules for children of non-citizens why can't we have special tax rules for naturalized citizens?
 
CRHeel94 said:
I wonder if the Europeans will at some point call Trump's bluff..something along the lines of "You want to pull out of NATO? Go ahead. Europe will defend Europe.".
1. The Russian threat is not as scary as it was 3 years ago. The boogey man is not quite as scary.
2. The euros take it as an opportunity to funnel government spending into their regional defenses industry.
3. Germany shrugs off its post war aversion to rebuilding its armed forces.

That scenario, in the long run, makes the world a more dangerous place. Trump is a fool for not understanding the importance of NATO in global stability and American preponderance in the last 75 years.
Click to expand...
That’s not what will happen and you’re ignoring basically the entire history of the European continent which is that they never ever have had a united defense policy up until 1945 (or 1991 if you want to get more technical about it).

NATO or European defense minus America is non-existent, it returns to everyone being for themselves again, and honestly at this stage in time there’s a decent chance Europe without America would fragment and Balkanize. There are A LOT of active separatist movements all across Europe that would benefit from a crisis. Everyone misunderstands right wing populism at this moment in time in Europe, demagogues don’t have the youth population numbers to do damage, in many ways they’re perhaps the only thing that might save the nation state. The logical progression of Europe is watching Spain break up into 5-6 countries, Germany into 3, Italy into several, etc. Forcing the locals to increase their defense spending to be remotely on par with where they need to be means taking money from elsewhere, which has helped maintain a modest standards of living in Europe but push people to the brink they’ll reassert power locally, not nationally with demagogues.

Part of why the demagogues are so pro-Russian is because the Russians understand this dynamic and have already have worked to neutered the threat to them from the right.
 
AlbionAmerican said:
NATO or European defense minus America is non-existent, it returns to everyone being for themselves again, and honestly at this stage in time there’s a decent chance Europe without America would fragment and Balkanize.
Click to expand...
ever heard of the european union? god, it boggles the mind some of the stupid shit that gets posted here.

how can they separate and go off on their own when they share a common currency? did you see how hard brexit was? and how stupid and destructive? brexit was easy compared to, say, a frexit.
 
Our military spending and commitments spearhead our nuclear and anti-proliferation strategy. If you reduce our commitments and spend, you have to accept that you will live in a world with several more nuclear powers. The fact that that is already happening (North Korea, Iran, KSA) doesn't make this strategy less relevant - it just increases dramatically the complexity of the situation every time a new nation that joins the club...

You have to manage this carefully and over decades - this is one issue where you can't FAFO.
 
Huh? said:
Our military spending and commitments spearhead our nuclear and anti-proliferation strategy. If you reduce our commitments and spend, you have to accept that you will live in a world with several more nuclear powers. The fact that that is already happening (North Korea, Iran, KSA) doesn't make this strategy less relevant - it just increases dramatically the complexity of the situation every time a new nation that joins the club...

You have to manage this carefully and over decades - this is one issue where you can't FAFO.
Click to expand...
ksa? i havent heard about that.
 

Russia rejects Trump’s Ukraine peace proposals​


"Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected proposals Monday floated by President-elect Trump’s allies to end the war in Ukraine, dealing a major setback for the incoming president’s hopes to freeze the conflict.

In an interview with Russian state-run media outlet TASS, Lavrov said Moscow has “not received any official signals regarding a settlement in Ukraine” but the Kremlin was resistant to those unofficial ideas.

“We are not happy, of course, with the proposals made by members of the Trump team to postpone Ukraine’s admission to NATO for 20 years and to station British and European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine,” he said, responding to leaked reports of Trump’s proposals.

Lavrov called for “reliable and legally binding agreements that would eliminate the root causes of the conflict and seal a mechanism precluding the possibility of their violation.” ..."
 
If you want a take a swing at the defense budget, I'd start by taking a closer look at the $1.7 trillion we are spending over 30 years to modernize our nuclear arsenal. While we certainly need to do some modernization, that's a huge number that can buy a lot of butter.
 
1. i think 99.99% of american people -- including virtually everyone on this board -- have no idea how to right size the defense budget because it takes vast knowledge even to know what everything is and why its there.

2. this is a good reason to elect leaders you can trust. then you can relax and think, the president and his advisors have this. they might not always make the right decisions but at least they are informed and well-thought out.

3. this is an especially good reason to avoid electing people who you are assuming are lying to you. if your case for voting for a president is that he wont do what he says, then by definition you cant trust them with a defense budget. and then we're back to the problem in step 1 -- none of us know how to do this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top