Alright. Let's jump back into this one.
There are ongoing difficulties with figuring out how the different national forces slot into a battle plan. Nearly three years after the start of the Ukraine war, the command and control arrangements in NATO remain flimsy, and forward-deployed forces remain relatively small. There is still no responsive layer cake, or the modern equivalent (multinational divisions are what they are gunning for, information on follow on forces or mobilization forces is very vague for either security purposes/they haven't figured that part out yet).
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I would need to do more reading to see what the current state of thought is. My NATO reading is most from before 1989. The BAOR is gone, the West German Corps are gone, the front line is the Bug and beyond, they're not going back to the layer cake, and they're planning on multinational divisions and hoping to dovetail/hybridize with/supersede the EU. It's a new NATO for a new era.
My money is on "they can't get an agreement on that part yet", not so much "they haven't figured it out yet".
It would not be more useful to use NATO's budget for 2025 in a decent economic aid plan... that does not end up in a numbered account?
Unfortunately, Russia is a kleptocracy.
There are no Russian leaders that would not put a modern Marshall Plan into their numbered accounts.
A different perspective - actual funding rather than %GDP:
Note that this really shows the impact of the different GDPs.
Sure, but the EU as a whole (as a stand-in for NATO) has 2/3rds the economy as the US, and so should be able to afford ~20-25% of the US military budget (less the nukes).
Also putting things in context over a longer period (although only for a couple of countries):
One thing I would point out in this is that from 1992 onwards we see Germany's reported military spending drop. One should probably remember that this would align with the reunification of East & West Germany which could be considered a non-military contribution. Remember that this has been estimated as costing up to 2M Euro.
Plus the German GDP suddenly increased (and the East German GDP per capita was HALF that of West Germany in 1989!), so their overall economy took a shit so massive it clogged the pipes for most of a decade.
And if you add the non-US figures you get around 500,000 million US dollars.
And, as ably pointed out by DWG - the US spend is NOT ONLY for NATO, but also Asia-Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and doubtless others.
Germany, and most other European NATO members are largely spending for European defence.
I'd argue that spending for Africa and the Middle East also supports NATO interests, in not having a war on their borders.
This discussion started with
@zen asking for our thoughts about 'Trump wants 5% Nato defence spending target, Europe told'.
I do not know if Europe will ever reach that target. Raising European defence budgets is work in progress, with more to come because of the war in Ukraine, but blindly shoveling money into European defence will not fix overnight the decay that was caused by years of neglect.
Anyone who spins that yarn is a fool or a fraud, maybe both.
I'd argue fraud before fool, personally.
Is there a cogent reason that the we are devoting more money to European defense than say great continental powers Germany, France, Italy and Spain combined? Our defense spending in general is more than the rest of NATO en masse. Can you articulate an argument why the United States must stay in an unequally yoked agreement with such powers if they now decide not to "want" to spend more money on the military, particularly for European defense?
If Europe is facing another boogeyman, surely those countries (rich EU countries) most concerned should "want" to spend more to reflect that reality, right? Or do they not really believe in that threat? Or is it because "historically" they could "want" to spend less because they knew their rich uncle would underwrite their defense while they invested in their own citizenry? Surely the EU representing 3/4 of our GDP collectively could comfortably muster more than 1/2 of our spending in the face of such an existential threat, could it not?
I'm not convinced that the US spending on NATO items is more than 1/3 of the total (USN is fairly heavily Pacific-biased, for example).
The EU also only represents 2/3rds of the US GDP, so approximately 2/9ths of the US military budget not counting STRATCOM/the nukes.
So if Europe pulled its weight, would US spending on defence decrease?
If so, where would the money go? Tax cuts?
If no, tax cuts anyway?
Ideally, the US would stop spending on things that aren't authorized under the Constitution. But at best we'd get a decrease in spending on those things, and
I want it to be easier to get off of the various welfare programs so spending on them would have to increase short term. The issue is that the total amount of benefits you can get is significantly greater than the cutoff point for benefit eligibility.
You'd basically have to get a raise from ~$15/hr to over $28/hr to make up for all the benefits you lose, so no one is willing to accept a raise that will take them above the poverty level if they have kids to support. And that doesn't do anyone any good.
