As an American, I am constantly opposing war mongering in my country. They're are many times when I've wanted to simply leave (most notably when Trump first took office). But we can't leave... The reasonable people need to stay, because the military the US has right now is fucking insane.

Here's a graph to spell things out for you:

If you want positive change, stop dreaming about the destruction of countries, and start working to change the hearts and minds of those residing in influential countries.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Seems like you're the one who's not very bright. Spending doesn't directly translate into anything tangible. The US military industrial complex is a vehicle for sucking up your taxes and putting them back into the hands of the oligarchs. The incentives it has is to produce overdesigned and expensive weapons that require huge amounts of maintenance in small quantities. This is how you end up with shit like F35. Meanwhile, Russia spending a fraction of what US does can produce three times the artillery shells that all western countries can combined https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Especially glaring examples is actually UK which have bigger budget than Russia in this graph, yet they admitted they would last 3 weeks in the war as in Ukraine, they have some really embarrassing public fuckup around every month, like the one where they send barely armed ships against Yemen or how their carriers break all the time, and they constantly shrink their army and navy and still have problems with getting enough basic personnel.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago

Exactly, we're now seeing that late stage capitalism can't even keep a military running.