In the past couple of posts, I talked about how the U.S. military is superior to all other countries on the planet, from budgets to personnel to assets. However, are two of the U.S.’s biggest military threats, Russian and China, catching up? The answer is, quite equivocally, yes.

Spending

Although the U.S. spends more on it’s military than both Russia and China combined (and you can also add in the next highest 5-6 countries as well), the U.S. has been reducing its military budget. Russia and China, on the other hand, have been increasing their military budges. Although both Russia and China will likely never spend what the U.S. does, they are spending what they allocate very wisely, which will be discussed later. Many of you are probably wondering how this could possibly be happening when the U.S. spends an exorbitant amount more than Russia and China. Well….. here ya go….

Technology

Some U.S. military leaders will agree  that Russia and China have already surpassed the U.S. military in certain areas regarding technology (click here for more information). Many advisers agree that the U.S. is far too dependent on Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). This is quite disturbing because all that Russia or China would have to do to cripple our systems is launch an electronic attack or cyber attack. Do we have sufficient systems in place to prevent such an attack? As recent events have shown, both Russia and China are quite capable of hacking in to our systems. The truth is this..if a war between the world’s greatest powers breaks out (disregarding nukes) the country with the best technology will have a great advantage. We need to become more technologically advanced. We need to be able to protect our technological systems. As the link above points out, we are falling behind both Russia and China in terms of fielding advanced weapons. 

Corruption

A large amount of money allocated to the U.S. military is wasted. With the amount of money being thrown around aimlessly, you would think that some high-school athlete that never had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of just received a multi-billion dollar guaranteed contract. The amount of money being wasted is incomprehensible. Just to give you a glimpse, $8.5 trillion (TRILLION!!!) that has been allocated since 1996 has never been accounted for. Let that sink in….

The List Goes on….and on….

The U.S has been tied up in wars for far too long and the cost has been enormous. More importantly, we have nothing to show for our efforts. Terrorism is as bad as it has ever been (I argue it’s worse), and the Middle East isn’t any better than it was before (again, I argue it’s worse). ISIS and the Taliban are worse now than they were before.

Furthermore, countries like China have much stronger purchasing power than we do. Why? Because China can buy their locally produced parts and services much cheaper than the U.S. can buy locally produced parts and services. So far, I’ve only mentioned 3 reasons why Russia and China are gaining ground on us….quickly. There are more, but I’ll leave that to another day.

Conclusion

We need a President and a Congress that focuses more on advancing our military technology and increasing the advantages we already have. Our budget needs to be scrutinized more carefully and vendors/suppliers need to be more accountable for the money that is given to them. A budget of that size should have it’s own independent accounting firm and auditor. At the very least.

The bottom line is this…with the amount of money we spend, we should be light years ahead of the rest of the world, but we are not. And that is unacceptable.