Our US military budget is so large it really needs little if any increases, other than perhaps a lumpiness for new projects or inflation.
The Chinese Taiwan threat to the peace is becoming center stage.
The Russians trying to leverage their relationship with China while warring in Ukraine makes us a little uneasy.
The press are decrying it all. Stirring us up, the press are creating a function. In the US the press always are agenda driven. The public has to have the sense we must spend on the military. We can not shirk that and balance global power otherwise.
But we wont really be increasing the military budget DRAMATICALLY because we are spending so much as is. The newer projects call for rebalancing the priorities of that spending.
Now my plug…kind of half kidding…all of the chip makers and designers are critical to the new equipment the military needs. We will be seeing major outlays to completely redesign and not just update all military equipment over this next decade. Not just in the US but throughout the west.
Expect Germany and France to also become the third super power by the end of the decade.
Our US military budget is so large it really needs little if any increases, other than perhaps a lumpiness for new projects or inflation. The Chinese Taiwan threat to the peace is becoming center stage.
Depends upon whether or not you think another Cold War is upon us.
Yes, spending as a % of GDP is lower now than in 1962.
However, that is more a representation that GDP has grown faster than inflation for the past 60 years.
If you take $50 billion from 1962 and correct for inflation, you get $490 billion in today’s dollars.
So, it might be a situation where both things are true–spending is a lower % of GDP, but yet it is so high that it doesn’t need a significant increase.
I hope the CHIPS act passes. While I’m not fond of corporate welfare, the fact is that wafer fabrication plants have become so expensive, and so vital to national security, having public assistance in this is almost a no-brainer.
Within the last 2 years I’ve started hearing that existing process nodes are so expensive to make that really only 3 companies world-wide can afford to build them: Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. And was also predicted that soon only 1 company will really be able to afford to build those plants. That company was always identified as Samsung, because of their close tie to the South Korean government.
But we need more than just the fabs. We need assembly and test, for example, as well. And these factories take 2+ years to build and populate with tooling. And we need to keep our lead in the design of these chips and their software. (that is also a global endeavor, partially because the number of people required makes it very had to hire them all in a single country anymore.)