3 ms·

Nato Membership is a contract. Yes, Indeed. tanks are not the biggest problem. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-you-want-a-russian-r

by bloodm 7y ago

Nato Membership is a contract. Yes, Indeed. tanks are not the biggest problem. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-you-want-a-russian-revolution/ https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-y... PS: "Germany is only one of 19 NATO members that have not met the 2% GDP spending goal set at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales."

lispm 7y ago
and the contract says nothing about what you claim. PS. : the spending goal is in the future: 2025. It‘s also a political goal, not a contract. And the current data can be seen here: https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_11/20191129_pr-2019-123-en.pdf https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_... Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim.
- bloodm 7y ago
  "Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim. " They are "vastly different" because most countries don't share their fair burden. Trump may be wrong in many things, here he is right. In the PDF you provided "NATO guideline 2%" But hey, why spent it on the military? Let the US spent/fight for us.
  - lispm 7y ago
    Well, you claim that there is a contract which binds NATO countries to spend 2% of their budget on military and that only Germany is not spending 2%. Everything of that is wrong, There is no contract. The goal of 2% is set for 2025, not now. Currently a bunch of countries spend less than 2%. And: large parts of the US military spending is completely unrelated to NATO. Next you need to ask yourself if these approximate numbers make sense: Europe minus Russia, without the US: defense spending of 350 billion USD. NATO has defense spending of 950 billion dollar. Russia: defense spending: 65 billion USD. Europe is already outspending Russia five times. NATO is outspending Russia by 15 times. This looks like lack of money is not the actual problem NATO has.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Your comparison is fatally flawed. If someone declared that the US/Europe doesn’t need to spend so much on social welfare or transit, because Russia and China spend much less in nominal dollars/euro, one would quite rightly point out that a dollar buys much more food or miles of subway tunnel in Russia than the United States. The same is true for Military spending. The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. If you don’t adjust for purchasing power, you’re comparing apples and oranges: https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expenditure-is-much-higher-than-commonly-understood-as-is-chinas/ https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expen... > Perhaps most importantly, the more methodologically sound approach to comparing defense spending based on PPP illustrates that the gap between U.S. expenditure on the one hand and that of Russia and China on the other has closed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today, when taken together, spending by Russia and China is roughly equal to U.S. defense expenditure, with Russia representing a much larger share than previously recognized. Moreover, even PPP probably doesn’t accurately depict the difference. Beijing spends about a billion dollars a year to operate a subway serving a city of 20 million people. New York spends ten times as much for a system half the length and half the ridership. Moscow spends 1/7 as much as New York to operate a larger system with more ridership. Military expenditures probably scale much closer to something like a subway system than the overall PPP basket of goods. In that case, we are probably looking at less than a factor of two advantage in what that spending actually buys.
      - lispm 7y ago
        > The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now. The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit. This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-affo... For example they have only a single old aircraft carrier: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-fire-1476975 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-f... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q The US OTOH has none or ten whole carrier fleets... Russia has submarines and a lot of nuclear technology. From time to time an old one sinks. The older ones are rotting somewhere... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468 That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes. For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons. See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s... It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs... It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources. True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same: https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defense-budget-bigger-than-you-think/ https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defen...

by bloodm 7y ago

lispm 7y ago

and the contract says nothing about what you claim. PS. : the spending goal is in the future: 2025. It‘s also a political goal, not a contract. And the current data can be seen here: https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_11/20191129_pr-2019-123-en.pdf https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_... Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim.

bloodm 7y ago
"Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim. " They are "vastly different" because most countries don't share their fair burden. Trump may be wrong in many things, here he is right. In the PDF you provided "NATO guideline 2%" But hey, why spent it on the military? Let the US spent/fight for us.
- lispm 7y ago
  Well, you claim that there is a contract which binds NATO countries to spend 2% of their budget on military and that only Germany is not spending 2%. Everything of that is wrong, There is no contract. The goal of 2% is set for 2025, not now. Currently a bunch of countries spend less than 2%. And: large parts of the US military spending is completely unrelated to NATO. Next you need to ask yourself if these approximate numbers make sense: Europe minus Russia, without the US: defense spending of 350 billion USD. NATO has defense spending of 950 billion dollar. Russia: defense spending: 65 billion USD. Europe is already outspending Russia five times. NATO is outspending Russia by 15 times. This looks like lack of money is not the actual problem NATO has.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Your comparison is fatally flawed. If someone declared that the US/Europe doesn’t need to spend so much on social welfare or transit, because Russia and China spend much less in nominal dollars/euro, one would quite rightly point out that a dollar buys much more food or miles of subway tunnel in Russia than the United States. The same is true for Military spending. The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. If you don’t adjust for purchasing power, you’re comparing apples and oranges: https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expenditure-is-much-higher-than-commonly-understood-as-is-chinas/ https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expen... > Perhaps most importantly, the more methodologically sound approach to comparing defense spending based on PPP illustrates that the gap between U.S. expenditure on the one hand and that of Russia and China on the other has closed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today, when taken together, spending by Russia and China is roughly equal to U.S. defense expenditure, with Russia representing a much larger share than previously recognized. Moreover, even PPP probably doesn’t accurately depict the difference. Beijing spends about a billion dollars a year to operate a subway serving a city of 20 million people. New York spends ten times as much for a system half the length and half the ridership. Moscow spends 1/7 as much as New York to operate a larger system with more ridership. Military expenditures probably scale much closer to something like a subway system than the overall PPP basket of goods. In that case, we are probably looking at less than a factor of two advantage in what that spending actually buys.
    - lispm 7y ago
      > The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now. The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit. This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-affo... For example they have only a single old aircraft carrier: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-fire-1476975 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-f... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q The US OTOH has none or ten whole carrier fleets... Russia has submarines and a lot of nuclear technology. From time to time an old one sinks. The older ones are rotting somewhere... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468 That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes. For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons. See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s... It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs... It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources. True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same: https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defense-budget-bigger-than-you-think/ https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defen...