This is always what I think when people say America has the best military because they spend the most of it. The cost doesn’t necessarily betray the quality. The contractors USA is using are absolutely charging absolutely egregious amounts for very little. As in, 5k for something you can 3d print for 10$. The actual military power of the USA might actually be multiple orders of magnitude less than what their budget says
For that reason I go by naval deckspace since military history is basically the history of who’s the best at building boats. If we go by military expenditure, we would assume that America’s military is 4x more powerful than the next most powerful military (China). If we go by deckspace, however, America and China are peers in military power. It gets even more complicated when you take into consideration that America’s latest weapons platforms (The F-35 and the Gerald R Ford class carriers) are designed around logical fallacies, and you have a situation where the world’s seas are patrolled by a paper tiger.
Add to this that American military doctrine is built entirely around either facing a peer nation like Russia or China or a non-peer colony like Nicaragua, and that the military is suddenly sizing up near-peer nations like Iran, and things could be about to get very spicy fast.
Here are some things people outside of the United States that people can advocate for to reduce America’s military influence:
Take to the streets and demand your governments divest themselves of the American Military Industrial Complex. F-35 diplomacy is America’s strongest ties to other nations
Get a movement going to teach your youths not to fight. Here in the states conscription is spinning up because no one is coming willingly to the recruitment centers anymore. More and more people are seeing the US military for what it really is, a giant slush fund and exploitation scheme. This is a new wrinkle I’ve never seen before in my life.
Have some grace for the people who fell for the propaganda schemes of the last 40-80 years that convinced them military service was about keeping nations safe and not about the continued rape of the global south
Create mutual aid projects that help people from being so desperately poor that they feel military service is the only way for them to eat. The strength of the labor movement has always been our ability to feed the people, and when we’ve failed it’s always been because people were too hungry to see that we wanted what they wanted: peace, dignity, and a life worth living
And I’m not even sure that calculation applies to the modern age. With supersonic missiles and drones, a massive carrier might just be a very big vulnerability
that’s a significant point and ties into my point about my GRF being build around a logical fallacy about modern warfare. not only is the american military a huge slush fund, it’s built around assumptions that may simply not make sense anymore. who knows what the future holds, but things are about to get weird. i have hope that enough of us who believe in a peaceful and just world will be able to harness the power of the people to forge a better world than the one we currently live in
Back in the day, I saw a bolt on the logistical ordering system (which I have forgotten the name of) for something like 1k+, I later checked Lowes for shits and giggles to see if they even had it. They did, the exact same one for $60 (it was a big fucking bolt, for like big machinery or something)
But we weren’t allowed to buy and use it because it’s illegal to get it for official purposes anywhere else but the ordering system if it was available there
There was a story the other day how the military procurers sent a ton of lobbyists and lawyers when they discovered someone 3d printed a replacement part for 1/1000th the cost. They successfully lobbied to forbid that…
This is always what I think when people say America has the best military because they spend the most of it. The cost doesn’t necessarily betray the quality. The contractors USA is using are absolutely charging absolutely egregious amounts for very little. As in, 5k for something you can 3d print for 10$. The actual military power of the USA might actually be multiple orders of magnitude less than what their budget says
For that reason I go by naval deckspace since military history is basically the history of who’s the best at building boats. If we go by military expenditure, we would assume that America’s military is 4x more powerful than the next most powerful military (China). If we go by deckspace, however, America and China are peers in military power. It gets even more complicated when you take into consideration that America’s latest weapons platforms (The F-35 and the Gerald R Ford class carriers) are designed around logical fallacies, and you have a situation where the world’s seas are patrolled by a paper tiger.
Add to this that American military doctrine is built entirely around either facing a peer nation like Russia or China or a non-peer colony like Nicaragua, and that the military is suddenly sizing up near-peer nations like Iran, and things could be about to get very spicy fast.
Here are some things people outside of the United States that people can advocate for to reduce America’s military influence:
And I’m not even sure that calculation applies to the modern age. With supersonic missiles and drones, a massive carrier might just be a very big vulnerability
that’s a significant point and ties into my point about my GRF being build around a logical fallacy about modern warfare. not only is the american military a huge slush fund, it’s built around assumptions that may simply not make sense anymore. who knows what the future holds, but things are about to get weird. i have hope that enough of us who believe in a peaceful and just world will be able to harness the power of the people to forge a better world than the one we currently live in
Back in the day, I saw a bolt on the logistical ordering system (which I have forgotten the name of) for something like 1k+, I later checked Lowes for shits and giggles to see if they even had it. They did, the exact same one for $60 (it was a big fucking bolt, for like big machinery or something)
But we weren’t allowed to buy and use it because it’s illegal to get it for official purposes anywhere else but the ordering system if it was available there
There was a story the other day how the military procurers sent a ton of lobbyists and lawyers when they discovered someone 3d printed a replacement part for 1/1000th the cost. They successfully lobbied to forbid that…