Informative Essay: The United States Defense Budget

The United States’ Defense Budget The United States alone spends nearly three times the amount of money on defense than their counterpart China. With a population of nearly four times more people than the United States, it is only logical to think China would spend much more. Why does the United States spend such a large amount of money on something that seems to have much less importance to other countries? The amount of money in the United States defense budget has been the highest in the world for multiple years. The budget has shown a general upward trend every year and shows no sign of stopping. This past year, the United States defense budget was around 585 billion US dollars (Department of Defense). People often question if

This would not hurt national security, because our military force is already overfunded.” (Frank 1). The best way to cut spending is not the military. There are many other programs that could reduce the budget deficit. There are funds that the United States sends to other governments. Some of the governments that receive the funds are not even friendly to the United States. The United States just sends the money for humanitarian reasons. These are areas that we should look at to cut spending before defense. Taking a look at the second part of the quote, my question is to whose standard is the military overfunded? Some people may say the military is underfunded. All the money sent to defense serves a purpose whether it be to compensate soldiers or to pay for technology that will advance us over our enemies. In the long run, the majority of this money sent to defense will protect us in one way or

The military has already been downsized since the Cold War. Since 1990, the army has gone from 172 combat battalions to 100, the Navy has gone from 546 ships to 288, and the Air Force has gone from 4,355 fighters to 1,990 (Samuelson 1). The amount of servicemen and women has declined significantly: “From the late 1980s to 2010, the number of America's armed forces dropped from 2.1 million men and women to about 1.4 million” (Samuelson 1). With the downsizing of our armed forces, we have become more dependant on the reserve armed forces. In the past 15 years we have used reserved soldiers more than ever before. The reserves only train one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer totalling 36 days a year. The reserves couldn’t be as proficient as regular duty military whose job it is to train for war daily. We have become dependant on these civilian soldiers more than ever before because of the downsizing of our military. Even though we have downsized, we continue to have the most defense spending in the world. We spend this much because we are one of the richest countries and we have great commitments to our allies around the world. Despite that the United States spends the most on defense in terms of dollars, the United States as of 2015 was ranked fourth in defense spending in relation to the country's GDP (Walter 1). The defense budget is where it is for a reason. The war on terrorism has been