Cutting military spending
A while back, I asked, "If you accepted the government did have to cut spending a lot, what would you cut." Several people made the obvious suggestion of cutting military. http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/784255.html
I'd meant to follow up on this, but never did. Ilanin made a helpful summary http://ilanin.livejournal.com/109586.html of what our military spending consisted of.
Obviously that's not an official evaluation of any kind, but it looked fairly plausible. I apologise for summarising a detailed post in a few lines, perhaps ilanin can correct me if my summary seems off-base. It seems the military spending can be described in basically three categories:
1. Normal army, navy and RAF, where we pay slightly more per population than a comparable European country (Germany), but not dramatically so.
2. Two aircraft carriers, where we're locked into the contract to pay for them whether we build them or not.
3. Trident.
One weird idea I wondered about, is would Germany, France, India and/or Brazil like to go part-shares in some aircraft carriers or nuclear deterrent? I imagine that's completely unworkable, but in some ways it might be better if the responsibility were spread out a bit more so there was still some deterrent, but less scope for rogue wars..?
You can also comment at http://jack.dreamwidth.org/832558.html using OpenID.
comments so far.
I'd meant to follow up on this, but never did. Ilanin made a helpful summary http://ilanin.livejournal.com/109586.html of what our military spending consisted of.
Obviously that's not an official evaluation of any kind, but it looked fairly plausible. I apologise for summarising a detailed post in a few lines, perhaps ilanin can correct me if my summary seems off-base. It seems the military spending can be described in basically three categories:
1. Normal army, navy and RAF, where we pay slightly more per population than a comparable European country (Germany), but not dramatically so.
2. Two aircraft carriers, where we're locked into the contract to pay for them whether we build them or not.
3. Trident.
One weird idea I wondered about, is would Germany, France, India and/or Brazil like to go part-shares in some aircraft carriers or nuclear deterrent? I imagine that's completely unworkable, but in some ways it might be better if the responsibility were spread out a bit more so there was still some deterrent, but less scope for rogue wars..?
You can also comment at http://jack.dreamwidth.org/832558.html using OpenID.
comments so far.