Like any male in his early late-forties, I have a deep seeded interest in everything World War related. And any movie, documentary set in those periods is an automatic watch for me. I am not a complicated man.
One of those intruding thoughts lthat keep popping up lately, most recently as I watched Dunkirk with my eldest son, is this: This isn’t how we do war anymore.
We don’t do massive battles, or one clear side against another. We don’t storm beachheads or take one trench after another.
So why are we still building our militaries like we do?
The Americans have 11 aircraft carriers, 71 submarines, 78 destroyers, 9 cruisers, 23 littoral combat ships and 31 amphibious assault ships. The Air Force has 762 F-16s, 2000 F-35s, 218 F-15, 183 F-22s, 140 Strategic bombers, 228 C-17s abd 450 flying tankers. Their land forces include 5,500 M1 Abrams tanks, 45,000 armored fighting vehicles, 1500 M109 Paladins, 1300 M777s and 700 HMARS/M270.
Oh, and nukes?
400 minuteman 3 silos. 3,700 nuclear warheads in active stockpile and 14 Ohio-Class missible submarines, each carrying 20 nukes.
And none of that includes the personnel, the bases and everything else that goes into it. With over 750 bases worldwide, it’s estimated that the US is sitting on a trillion dollars of real estate alone.
The Americans spend more on their military per year than the next 10 countries combined. US Defense spending accounted for nearly 40% of all military expenditures for the entire planet. And this was based on 2024 data, before Trump added an extra half trillion dollars for shits and giggles.
But this isn’t how we do war anymore.
Look at Ukraine, look at Iran. The US is battling down $50,000 drones with $4,000,000 missiles.
The US has 27 Navy ships in the region, including 3 aircraft carriers while the Iranians are getting their shit from Best Buy.
This entire long winded rant is my way of saying that Warfare is being fought asymmetrically, so can we stop spending so much goddamn money on shit we’re never going to use?
Use it for books or Pokemon, it’d be less of a waste.
-sohmer
