Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
Unfortunately. This piece from the April 2023 edition of the Atlantic does a great job of breaking down the breakdown in US naval/nautical capabilities since the end of the Cold War. It also proposes specific, practical fixes to get us back on track.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-china/673090/
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It's funny / ironic because one of the "conventional wisdom" items is that the US spends more on the military than "the rest of the world combined", which aside from not being true, only about $150 billion of the $700-800 billion budget is procurement. China's procurement budget isn't nearly as far behind at ~$95 billion as people think. Because of PPP, their training budget goes a lot farther than the US dollar does, they have fewer bases to maintain (which sucks up a lot of US dollars), they don't have to pay their soldiers nearly as well as the US does with an all volunteer army and relative wage differences, and they don't roll the same things into their military that the US does (like health care for service members and pensions/retirement costs).
All that being said, China has some serious structural strategic problems that the US doesn't. It's literally surrounded by hostile countries (with the exception of North Korea and Russia). It's the world's largest food and energy importer, and their lines of trade are easily interdictable.
The US is effectively energy independent, and the world's largest food exporter. We are surrounded by two oceans and two friendly powers to the North and South who happen to be our two largest trading partners as well. We're sort of like Rome in the sense that disunity at home is a much bigger threat than the barbarians at the gates, because our oceans make really strong gates.