To be clear, my main point was that they spend a lot of attention/work on the issue, not that they’re doing a highly competent job. The US spends almost $800 B per year on the military, a whole lot of which is just there to prepare for future potential conflicts. Other countries of course also have large military presences, even if they don’t have active conflicts.
My impression is that a lot of this money is being spent highly inefficiently, but it’s definitely being spent.
On “incredibly well prepared”, I just meant, “well for what I could expect from the government”. The US military has 600 international bases, and the US does lots of diplomacy in order to better secure its longstanding military strategic position. Other large governments do similar diplomatic measures.
I think it’s very easy to find flaws in these systems, but they seem more important to said governments than the vast majority of their priorities, and I think they’re correspondingly often taking fairly reasonable actions.
To be clear, my main point was that they spend a lot of attention/work on the issue, not that they’re doing a highly competent job. The US spends almost $800 B per year on the military, a whole lot of which is just there to prepare for future potential conflicts. Other countries of course also have large military presences, even if they don’t have active conflicts.
My impression is that a lot of this money is being spent highly inefficiently, but it’s definitely being spent.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spending-from-2000-to-2012/
On “incredibly well prepared”, I just meant, “well for what I could expect from the government”. The US military has 600 international bases, and the US does lots of diplomacy in order to better secure its longstanding military strategic position. Other large governments do similar diplomatic measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases
I think it’s very easy to find flaws in these systems, but they seem more important to said governments than the vast majority of their priorities, and I think they’re correspondingly often taking fairly reasonable actions.