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Agreed! The U.S also spends far and away more than what is necessary for its own defence....it is more motivated by geopolitics than defense of allies.
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Originally Posted by Jaggy001
The US maintains these bases because it suits our interests. I don't think most Europeans would care if we closed them.
They would care.
The US is one of the biggest salary-payers of employees in Germany and Italy near bases.
In an area near an Army base, the works council makes sure that they're employees are taken care of.
The US military is the family business in other countries as well as in the US.
There can be 20-25 Dept Army Civilians (DAC)s in an organization with close to 400 local national employees.
That's only one organization on one base.
Soldiers live off-base.
Rents are paid, utilities paid, etc. etc. etc. by the US government in every community.
The Italians and Germans would care for these reasons.
There's only one small base in the Netherlands, 2 in Belgium.
Time to end that gravytrain and spend it here at home on infrastructure and the like.
In my uneducated opinion, you can't look at the combined defense spending of the EU (from which union at least one NATO member is missing, anyway) and compare it to the defense spending of one country like Russia. The EU does not have a cohesive and unified military command, and thus could not deploy "its" forces with the same degree of coordination as that of a single nation.
I agree that the defense of continental Europe, if necessary, should be left to the continental Europeans
Agreed! The U.S also spends far and away more than what is necessary for its own defence....it is more motivated by geopolitics than defense of allies.
Around half of it is just plain pork. The Pentagon doesn't even want any more tanks but Republicans in Congress force them to take thousands more which the Army doesn't even want. The Air Force says it has all the C-130's it will ever need, it's been saying that for 10 freaking years, but Republicans in Congress force them to take more. The Air Force says it doesn't want any more stealth bombers and what is more is it says the stealth bomber is so old it is obsolete and they intend to start retiring the plane yet once again Republicans in Congress force them to take more.
It's time to stop the insanity by, at the very least, not buying garbage which the Pentagon says it neither needs nor wants. Yet this sort of nonsense accounts for between 20%-30% of the total military budget. It's just waste on a grand scale and a perfect example of corruption where contractors bribe politicians with "campaign donations" and then get to feed like pigs off public money. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars per year not some petty $10,000 arts grant.
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