And yet you’re still talking about absolute costs, not relative costs.
Yes, for reasons I already explained:
Apologists for the US military always try to pull out these bizarre metrics, like framing it based on GDP. Who gives a shit about percent GDP? Are you saying that richer countries ought to spend more on the military for no reason, just because they have more money to burn? It’s insanity. Military spending is meant to counter specific threats, if a small, poor country is threatened by an aggressive neighbor, they might spend more as a percentage of GDP in order to achieve something close to military parity. But when you’re spending more than the next nine countries combined, it has nothing to do with parity or security and everything to do with supremacy and domination - not to mention corruption.
Let me ask you this: is your stance that any country should be gradually decreasing its military spending as it grows richer?
No, my stance is what I already explained, that military spending should be (at most) what is necessary to maintain military parity with specific threats, as I already explained:
Apologists for the US military always try to pull out these bizarre metrics, like framing it based on GDP. Who gives a shit about percent GDP? Are you saying that richer countries ought to spend more on the military for no reason, just because they have more money to burn? It’s insanity. Military spending is meant to counter specific threats, if a small, poor country is threatened by an aggressive neighbor, they might spend more as a percentage of GDP in order to achieve something close to military parity. But when you’re spending more than the next nine countries combined, it has nothing to do with parity or security and everything to do with supremacy and domination - not to mention corruption.