Why the US Military Costs so Much

At the core, each army has defensive capabilities and are capable of protecting their Homeland from foreign threats. The Icelandic Armed Forces, for example, are made up of four ships, one plane, three helicopters and four radar stations, all operated by the country's Coast Guard. Beyond a small para

military

peacekeeping unit made up of volunteers the nation has almost no capacity to deploy abroad; in fact, its Constitution does not even have a mechanism for declaring war. Some militaries rely on their defensive capabilities with a limited expeditionary posture capability to conduct a small-scale operation overseas. This requires an expensive combination of training equipment. and planning, while national capabilities can be permanent and stationary, all expeditionary capabilities must inherently be designed to be temporary and mobile, this prohibits everything from the ability to fire a missile to the ability to prepare breakfast, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity, for this reason, large-scale expeditions.

Capabilities are largely limited to the largest and best-funded militaries, such as those of France, Mexico or Canada, but then there is the US

military

, which is in a class of its own, while most nations They can defend themselves at home and some can be deployed abroad. The US military has a rather unique capability. strategic posture they have essentially turned the entire world into their own territory their goal is complete is the ability to fight any type of fight anywhere at any time for an American which might sound like the inherent function of an army, but it is an exclusively Most American militaries are simply designed to respond to relevant regional threats and can be expanded to fight war abroad if necessary in order to fulfill this comprehensive mission.

The US military has a degree of flexibility and comprehensiveness unmatched by any other, which incurs close risk. an endless array of exceptional

costs

for the force they pay to produce their own private brand of chicken tenderloins and ship them around the world to places like this base in southeastern Turkey because they have a grocery store there because they have thousands of members of the service there. because that's where they keep about 50 nuclear warheads in case they decide to use one in Europe, Africa, the Middle East or elsewhere. They pay professional sports teams to incorporate patriotic ceremonies honoring past and present service members into their games to help boost recruiting. the level necessary to staff all of their roles around the world, they pay to develop an occasionally viral bipedal humanoid robot because they believe that in the future they can gain a competitive advantage against other forces by integrating these robots into their ranks and meeting the more boring, dirty tasks and dangerous tasks, these

costs

grow and grow on top of each other and then spread around the world from a spatial and logistical point of view.

Covering the world is nothing short of a monumentally challenging and expensive task. Then there is the temporal component to ensure the right soldiers with the right ones. The weapons and technology are in the right places, a predictive approach and proactive planning are required and predicting what future war will be like and then preparing for it is also an extremely costly endeavor. Take, for example, the USS Freedom, the first local combat ship of its type commissioned in 2008 in At just under 400 feet or 120 M long, this ship lacks in size, it more than makes up for it in design complexity and technology. on end.

This ship represents two full decades of planning and prediction, research and development. Hiring and commissioning nearly an inconceivable dedication of time and resources, but one that begins to make sense when considering expectations when it was conceived in the 1990s. The regional combat ship was intended to lead the US Navy for the next half century with the Cold War coming to an end. had found itself over-indexed on warships designed to patrol and fight on the high seas, suddenly without a comparable rival, the United States was the world's only naval superpower and its fleet needed to reflect this new order now the preeminent new war with pirates, terrorists and firearms.

Runners moving along the coasts required something agile, fast and flexible enough to keep pace between coastal waters where threats were diverse and warfare often asymmetrical to fill the void. Navy officials presented two ideas: the dd21, a larger form capable of standing its ground. Coastal Waters or what the planners called Street Fighter a smaller, sleeker and critically cheaper option from the jump, these Street Fighters were more attractive, would require smaller crews, would be quickly able to surprise enemies, would be stealthy and with the arrival of new hull technology, they would be light enough to push 45 knots while still having ocean-wide range and carrying a payload, if that were not enough to future proof such a concept, they would be modular 2, capable of changing weapons systems and kits to adapt to different missions from surface combat to mind-blowing, but still in the year 2000 such a street fighter was just a concept, a concept that the Navy quickly turned over to private contractors after it proved too difficult to update internally by signing agreements with both General Dynamics and Martin. each producing two ships in two separate models, the Navy handed the project over to the private sector assuming that competition between the two for future LCS contracts would produce a 21st century mainstay, while the enormous range had begun to drive up the price the Navy He expected that these ships could be relatively cheap by shipbuilding standards, between $150 and $225 million per unit.

In 2009, the United States had two ships, one from each contractor, but not four, as budget overruns on both models were so extreme that the Navy canceled contracts for the second. of each, what was supposed to be 200 million at most had ballooned to about double the price, the problem was that however the LCS remained a critical cog in the planned New Age naval fleet and They needed to buy

much

more than two 56 of them. in fact either 82 or 63 or 55 or most recently 52 depending on their evolving ship for structure projections, but it didn't matter how many they needed a lot and they needed them fast as lcss was expected to replace the old obsolete sweepers and refrigerators and instead of settling for a single class of LCS as previously planned to incentivize competition, they proposed to Congress an alternative what they called a dual award strategy that offered each company a contract for 10 chips over the next 5 years while the Problems with the Navy's current LCS were already beginning to show.

As a general rule of thumb in shipbuilding, a ship can have range, it can have speed, and it can have a heavy payload, but it can't have all three at once, with speed as the primary mandate. Both General Dynamics and Locki Martin had to get creative and make sacrifices while both classes are capable of an incredible 44 knots, between 10 and 15 more than a typical Navy ship, they made separate design decisions to get there for the Independence class. , this meant a unique aluminum trimmer and Hall for the Liberty class while locked. Martin opted for a more conventional steel monal, innovating on the powertrain side and developing a complicated combination gear that connected the ship's diesel engines to its gas turbines.

Both designs were innovative but both had problems. It turns out that the aluminum holes are brittle and run at speeds above just 15 knots or in rough seas, they may break as for the combined gear. Well, it was difficult to keep them running as the components were buried so deep in the boat that maintenance personnel could barely reach them and when they broke down as they did early and often they were so complicated that Navy personnel had to wait for Locki engineers to diagnose the problem and find the solution. Then there was the problem of survivability. Built as a combat ship, the LCS was intended to reach level one.

Survival capacity. The ability to continue. operations after an explosive submarine attack in 2010, the same year it pushed for Congress to greenlight 20 more of these ships, the Navy admitted that the ships already produced had not reached level one survivability and still got worse in the rush to get these ships. in the water no time was taken to ensure that all the ship's modules actually worked, when they came to test the modules it turned out that they were not, the anti-submarine warfare module turned out to be unreliable because the ship itself is so noisy that the toad's sonar does not can reliably pick up no other noise, Similarly, the mine countermeasures package, which relies on onboard sensors and an unmanned influence sweep system, has been plagued by delays, breakdowns and a tendency to cause false alarms.

What was supposed to be an infinitely customized ship capable of surface combat underwater hunting and mind-sweeping has effectively become just a gunship that can't take a hit regardless of these varying limitations. As of 2023, the US Navy purchased 30 lcss, shot down a sea with which they crashed into walls of In the Panama Canal, they have spent a winter trapped in a frozen river on the St. Lawrence River, they have made a handful of minor missions and have spent an average of around 500 million per ship to build a ship that was supposed to be the future. The regional combat ship has proven to be nothing short of a disaster, a reality the Navy has finally begun to confront by decommissioning or working to decommission nine of the vessels that, by all metrics, the LCS has failed to live up to. its high turnover and has publicly failed. and expensive, but it is far from the only decades-old development project to fail.

Boeing Sikorski won the contract to build the Kamanche helicopter in 1991, but after a decade of work and $7 billion invested in the project, only two prototypes left the market. As for America's first stealth destroyer, the Zoom Walt, its weapons system has yet to demonstrate the range it promised, its missile system cannot consistently hit targets, and its guided projectiles cost a prohibitive $800,000. per unit, with high hopes similar to those of the LCS, the zumalt project. It was eventually scrapped after only three ships were built, the most famous the F35. The Joint Strike Fighter and next-generation adaptive and advanced future has seen one glitch and ruined budget after the next for two entire decades, costing the vote 89.% over what was initially predicted and the list goes on with countless other smaller, multi-million dollar doll projects, to some extent, these errors and miscalculations make sense when working to invent the future of war.

Costly changes and failures are part of the development process, but this is not always the case and it increasingly seems that the swings have become larger and the errors more frequent when the Department of Defense wants to build a ship, a plane or a system. weapons, there is a select group of five companies that he typically turns to. Grummond Boeing and General Dynamics, excluding Boeing, all of these companies make the majority of their revenue from us or from allied military contracts that are only done with U.S. approval, but even excluding foreign defense. 71% of Locki Martin's income, for example, comes from the US government.

That translates to $47.5 billion a year. In other words, Locki Martin receives more each year from the US government. USA than NASA, a major government agency; In fact, if the defense contractor were a government agency, it would be the 24th largest recipient of money. The US government than most government agencies, but unlike agencies, thanks to this business, Martin makes profits of almost a billion dollars a month, but the war was not always so profitable. Venture technology was what brought the private sector into battle, while in centuries past armies were defined primarily by human power, the advent of airplanes marked perhaps the largest example yet of a non-military technology that could be used to gain a militaristic advantage during and after World War I, several fledgling aerospace companies were awarded modest contracts with the US military.Total annual production was in the tens or hundreds, but then suddenly World War II hit, the US and its allies needed as many planes as they could get and with that the US government started awarding colossal contracts to anyone who could build a plane blocked by Goodyear McDonald.

Douglas Boeing Hughes Grumman Northrip VA conve and more, while all of these companies had existed in some form before the war, it was for all intents and purposes what established them. McDonald, for example, went from employees to 5,000. Hughes went from 4 to 80,000 as a sum, while in the Six years before the war, the US built barely 20,000 aircraft, during it the country's manufacturers produced a huge quantity of 300,000, but then the war ended and this was bad for commercial aircraft manufacturers. Aircraft manufacturers immediately ran into difficulties, some pivoted toward civil aviation, others refocused on automobile manufacturing, others still Well-established, the United States government sought contracts that could be used to keep afloat this new industrial sector that played a no small role in the Allied victory quite quickly, although a new conflict arose.

The Cold War, in its early days rumors arose that the Soviet Union had produced an unconscionable number of long-range bombers as the world had entered the nuclear age, this greatly worried the American media, the public and ultimately Ultimately, to Congress, it was believed that their new enemy could directly eradicate the U.S. In response, Eisenhower ordered an immediate surge of American bombers. production and accepted a closed proposal to develop the U2 high-altitude surveillance aircraft, which would fly over the Soviet Union undetected, at least in theory, and get a definitive answer to how formidable its bomber fleet had become.

The answer was not

much

, it was a mere fraction. than had been speculated but blocked and other manufacturers had already cashed their checks, so the response meant little to them, an almost identical story emerged a few years later with the missiles that the Soviets had launched Sputnik and the Democrats of the era used the event to propagate a narrative that Eisenhower and his Republican John F. Kennedy, in the run-up to the 1960 presidential election, latched onto inflated estimates of Soviet missile capabilities leaked from the Air Force and began to make the imbalance perceived a central part of his campaign.

He argued that his policy enemies were ignoring this threat and the American public believed him even after being given definitive evidence to refute this fact. He continued the rhetoric that it was so politically useful that it helped accelerate US missile development. It was a much-needed windfall for the American aerospace sector. Given the waning need for high-volume aircraft development, it was this same incident that precipitated the first use of the phrase military-industrial complex in Eisenhower's farewell speech, where he warned of the danger of the phenomenon, the subsequent escalation of the Cold War kept the defense industry alive and ushered in an era of growth as US military spending began to rise steadily, but then the Wall fell and there was no more Cold War, the Department of Defense warned contractors on massive spending cuts, this started a consolidation and acquisition frenzy as the industry prepared to weather what they believed would be the first sustained period of peace in their existence, defense spending declined, but only slightly and only by one moment. 9/11 and subsequent wars quickly returned the US to the historical trend of almost perpetual increased spending and today these wars largely ended the most popular new justification for military spending is growth Military power Chinese now many of these alleged threats may be legitimate, but it's hard to know for sure because the defense industry, its lobbyists and politicians are incredibly effective at shaping public discourse in In fact, the vast majority of major Think tanks are funded, at least in part, by advocacy contractors.

These same think tanks are the ones that politicians and the media use as a supposedly expert justification to finance the fight against new emerging threats, ignoring for the moment the most unknowable question. As to whether defense industry profiteering is effective in practice, it is undeniable that incentive structures certainly exist, but perhaps the best evidence of the influence of this phenomenon is the fact that spending Current inflation-adjusted military is approaching World War II levels despite no active activity. US involvement in any major conflict can, of course, still be debated as to whether this level of spending is justified by the current geopolitical landscape, but what is undeniable is that taxpayers are getting less and less for their money.

There was a time when defense spending undeniably had massive effects. The U.S. military was a major financial force behind the development of world-changing innovations such as nuclear technology, GPS, and the Internet. In fact, in the 1960s, one-third of global funding for research and development came from U.S. defense-related spending, but today that share has fallen. at just 3% and what was once perhaps the most innovative force in the world has become downright bad at it. The US automotive industry, for example, has accelerated its pace of development. Now get a car to market faster. The U.S. commercial aircraft industry has evolved. a little slower but in the realm of a military aircraft something dramatic has happened what used to take three, five or seven years now extends to decades a key part of the problem is that the government has taken the inefficiencies of the public sector and made them pushed into the private sector where they can make profits.

When developing a new generation of airplanes or ships or anything, the dood sets strict parameters that invert traditional incentive structures, most industries see the private sector innovate to create new products that their customers will want in this In this case, the customer tells the private sector exactly what it wants and this industry spends heavily on lobbyists, many of whom used to work for the Department of Defense to shape contracts toward what they can build with risky R&D. minimum, which stifles innovation, but even then the risk to the contractor is further mitigated because a large portion of contracts are awarded on a Cost Plus basis, that is, the government pays what it costs to build a given technology. and then the contractor gets an additional percentage as profit, which is a direct disincentive. cost efficiency since the more a project costs, the more the contractor makes, of course, in the normal industry, the contractor would still be incentivized towards efficiency to win the next contract, but in this industry, 2 thirds of major construction contracts weapons systems, for example, are taken on by just one company while more contracts are awarded without a competitive bidding process, perhaps most egregious is that it is well understood that some contracts are awarded to struggling ineffective companies simply because the government of The US does not want that company to go bankrupt and therefore lose its manufacturing capabilities.

This is perhaps one of the strongest justifications for the expense that the US military cannot afford to block Boeing, Raon or the other contractors from bankruptcy because they are the only companies in the world capable of producing the technologies they provide to the force. To combat such a technological advantage, a situation has been created in which these companies are too important to fail and know that in order to benefit from their necessity rather than their effectiveness, the aforementioned way only scratches the surface of the Deep Web of incentives that maintains the The military-industrial complex is alive, but in essence it is as simple as this.

It is good for politicians politically and good for contractors economically to create the perception of problems that simply do not exist. No one is punished when a threat does not materialize. We can argue that their response from which they benefited politically or economically mitigated the threat, while individuals are punished when a threat they claimed did not exist materializes and disincentivizes anyone from doing so. Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion and at its core, the military-industrial complex has created an incredibly effective system to harness it, as you may have noticed, the latest Wover video is no longer on YouTube.

It's a long and frustrating story, but long story short, there was a quick clip of personal information on a passport. YouTube's cyberbullying and harassment policy includes a provision against sharing personally identifiable information like this, and while it was clearly unintentional, the video was removed as an attack on the policy, which seems fair given the wording of this policy, unfortunately unlike most privacy issues on YouTube Videos because this was removed as a policy strike, we do not have the ability to rectify the issue even though it could be done with a quick blur, for which the video is permanently deleted at least on YouTube, as some creator friends saw a couple of years ago. and got together to try to take advantage of the best parts of YouTube and rectify some of its problems.

We call it nebula and it has been doing fantastic statistically with over half a million subscribers, hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, award nominations and more except one. One small way we improved from YouTube was by adding this little button on our back that allows the Creator to swap files in a video to fix errors, make improvements, or in this case, blur that passport so the video stays in the nebula , but we also designed the platform with a unique business model that allows us to fund exclusive higher budget content, so another video about nebula is the latest episode of the logistics office on weapons manufacturing that developed on the topic of this video to show the nitty-gritty of how the US military and its industrial partners manufacture and distribute physical weapons of war without those weapons endangering anyone along the way.

Clearly you've made it to the end of this video so I know you'll enjoy it as it was written from the beginning to appeal to those who enjoyed this video we have a huge list of originals coming over the next few months many of which I'm I'm sure they'll want to see. In addition to the logistics of X, we have perhaps the most ambitious and largest budget wover or budget. to date in pre-production right now and if all that isn't compelling enough, it's worth mentioning that we designed Nebula to really make it worthwhile not only for you, the viewer, but also for the creators.

When you sign up to our link, we'll earn a share of your subscription revenue for as long as you stay subscribed, providing a stable and predictable monthly income that we can rely on to grow, unlike streams and ad rates, so if Want to get access to Nebula's huge catalog of originals content and help support the channel, simply click the button on the screen or head to and when you do, you'll get 40% off an annual plan, reducing the cost less than $3 a month.