Weapons |
A Look At The World's Military
When we think of the US military, many of us think of the most powerful armed force on earth. We take extreme pride in our forces and we feel that no threat to them can be too big for them to overcome. When World War II started, the US Army was only 17th in size in the world. It had only 174,000 officers and men. Marshall had been put in charge and managed to increase the size of the army. When Pearl Harbor was hit, we had gotten the number up to 1,606,000 men, but they lacked training and equipment. He couldn't help but notice that a couple of his officers stood out during maneuvers and they were Eisnehower and Patton, who staged a 380 mile circle around the other side to win the day. If you were to look at a chart of military spending you would have to notice that when you compare it to the size of the economy, U.S. military spending has been going down, more or less, since 1955.
US Troops The years of World War II saw us spending about 37-38 percent of economy on the war. This trickled down right after the war to almost 20% then it went as low as 3.5% for a very short period of time and began to rise again until it reached almost 11% in 1955. It hung around at about 10% from 1956 to 1959, then began to move around 9% to 1963. Again it began to drop with a few fluctuations up such as in 1967 where it went up from 7.7% to about 9%. From there it was mostly downhill until the budget finally was in the 3% range. It has gone up from 3.0% in 2000 to 3.7% in 2003. The Bush years saw an increase in this spending His first term the entire Federal budget grew 32% and even more the second term. Much of the defense money was wasted on canceled projects, or projects with huge cost overruns. Some of the weapons systems served no purpose, because they were designed to fight the cold war and not the types of wars we are fighting now. We certainly don't need a 120,000,000 dollar plane to fight a terrorist. If we were to classify countries by the size of their military the list would look like this:
People's Republic Of China Military When we list countries by the size of their military, it is a bit misleading. At the present time the most modern and best trained military in the world is the US military. Is it invincible? I would like to think so, but in this day of nuclear weapons and 600 mile per hour torpedoes, nothing is invincible. It certainly does have the best chance in a fight however. Can we retain this commanding lead? It depends how serious some other countries are about building up their military Take China for example, their economy is getting very strong and if they wanted to pump more money into military spending they would be able to do it. So far they have been moving slowly, preferring to improve their country first. Oh don't get me wrong they are improving their military every day, but not at the rate that they could if they wanted to go all out. The Republic of Korea is under constant threat from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea who has a military twice their size and no doubt probably has a nuclear weapon and rockets that could deliver it into South Korean, because of this there are probably more mines planted between the two countries than anywhere else in the world.
Members Of The Russian Pacific Fleet One of the most interesting military areas is the European Union. That area has been trying to get an integrated military since before the European Union even existed. The first attempt was in 1952 with the failed European Defense Community. If we add up the military spending of each European country we find that it adds up to about 311 billion dollars, slightly half of what the US spends on its military. There is much cooperation between European countries on weapons building such as the Eurofighter Typhoon which was developed by Britain, Italy, Germany and Spain. On February 28, 2009 a vote was affirmed to create a Synchronized Armed Forces Europe (SAFE). This is the first step in an all European force.
The Flag Of Al-Quada In Iraq Then there are the terrorists. It is hard to figure out the amount of terrorists in the world. One man's terrorist is another's hero. Al-Quada has been estimated to contain about 18,000 members. This figure is increasing as the war in Iraq goes on. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of terrorist groups throughout the world. Sometimes the picture get muddled. For instance Iran claims to have taken down a terrorist group that was going to launch an attack. We consider Iran one of the main supporters of terrorist groups, thus the picture gets foggy. A Rand study showed that the way most terrorist groups have ended since 1968 was either because of good police work or by negations with the governments of countries. It turns out that there has been enough money spent on the military world wide to have given every citizen of earth a nice house, health coverage and some luxuries |
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