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The irony is that western free nations owe their safety to America’s military, and by extension this sacrifice of the American people, if you follow the post’s logic
That's debatable whether the U.S. military does anything other than make defense contractors wealthier.
It’s really not debatable. Ukraine wasn’t under US protection… they got invaded. We’re now arming them and it’s helping them to put up a fight. There’s no debate that the US military doesn’t enable protection to a LOT of countries. The problem is that sometimes we protect the wrong nations… like Israel or Turkey. Countries which aren’t even culturally or strategically aligned, but are simply allies due to location.
Another point to this is how quickly the US deployed two carrier strike groups into the med and is preventing Yemen and Iran from getting involved in Israel freely bombing Gaza.
Turn to Asia and look at the power projection the US has with China regarding Taiwan and the Philippines. We just had another US military boat in waters “claimed” by China.
I’ll demand better of my country, but there is no denying our military power.
Nobody is denying it, but I'd argue the well-belabored point that the US military is overmatched against all others, astoundingly so.
We can and should slow down on military budgets a little, and use that money to better fund orgs like the GAO. Let's get a handle on where all our tax dollars are going. That we have so much excess supply of Bradley's and such to be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar to Ukraine is a sign we're doing too much.
Huh? A single carrier group influences an entire regional military balance when it rolls by. We have 11.
It's really good at fucking a place up then leaving and making defense contractors very wealthy. All our broken ass Congress can agree on is increasing the defense budget, again, even though the Pentagon continues to fail it's audits like a kid walking down stairs with it's shoes tied.
There's a fairly easy thought experiment we can do. If the US cut back its military to what was only necessary for domestic defence, and NATO dissolved, what would the rest of Europe do? I think a lot of countries would bolster their defense spending significantly.
Defense contractors certainly get a lot more wealthy, but the rest of the West benefits considerably from the US military nonetheless.
Name three nations the US has couped to replace their democratically elected leader with a corrupt autocrat that sold gladly his people to US interest in exchange of power.
The benefits the grandparent commenter pointed out aggregate to North America, Western Europe and Oceania, while the costs you point out are imposed elsewhere.
What does that have to do with their point though? They're saying that the rest of the West enjoys their prosperity because of the American military, and I don't think they're wrong. The coups and corruption elsewhere around the world are what enabled the prosperity.
This trend starting to buck has provided more military engineering jobs than any bullshit the US military has ordered in decades. Come on Europe, get afraid. Buy some more weapons. Heh.