Heh, just posted in the thread for last years version of this ah anyway. Great work! Haven't had time to rifle through all this text, anyway have you noted that a large part of the national debt is also because of military spendings.



My opinion on the military then, brace yourselves here comes opinions; A strong military is needed for a superpower like the US but it has grown vastly out of proportion to need. The problem with such a monstrous military funding is that what we have here is what dear old Eisenhower called a military industrial complex, which means that you cannot lower military spending because that would mean that people lose jobs, and the economy would suffer because of it as well as making people unhappy so that politicians lose votes. So we have a nation dependent on their military to support their economy. Russia has already fallen into that sinkhole and so has the US.



Much of the military spending of the US are spent on mostly useless Hi-tech hardware. When most of the potential enemies of the US have weaponry that couldn't even hope to glance the armour of a US Apache/ M1A2 Abrams , etc why do the US need to invest in even more hi tech things? China is so economically involved in the US that a war is economically impossible. North Korea may have a large army but their tech is subpar. Still the US invests in useless hardware like Hi Tech submarines and jet fighters (like the F-22) even though current hardware is quite enough to do the job.



I would not be so biased that I would say that this caused the Iraq war, but there is a saying.

''If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.''



The US has a military addiction, which worries me because when America goes ill it affects all of us.



Well that's my 5 cent.



The US is definitely better than China, Russia and other totalitarian states but the US aims to be a democracy and a state to look up to unlike other oligarchys. It's difficult to improve if you aren't aware of your shortcomings. I criticise USA because I care for her, not because I hate her.



This was copy pasted from a post in last years version of this.