China Says US Spends Too Much on Military

[Feuer Frei!]

Looks like he's got a point.

The United States is spending too much on its military in light of its recent economic troubles, China's top general said Monday while playing down his country's own military capabilities.The chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army, Chen Bingde, told reporters he thought the U.S. should cut back on defense spending for the sake of its taxpayers. He was speaking during a joint news conference in which he traded barbs with visiting U.S. counterpart Adm. Mike Mullen.
"I know the U.S. is still recovering from the financial crisis," Chen said. "Under such circumstances, it is still spending a lot of money on its military and isn't that placing too much pressure on the taxpayers?

"If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people ... wouldn't that be a better scenario?" he said.


The world's two biggest economies frequently clash over financial issues, such as Beijing's resistance to exchange rate reforms and the ballooning U.S. trade deficit with China. Such issues are not usually at the forefront of military talks, though both sides chide each other for their defense spending.China's military budget of $95 billion this year is the world's second-highest after Washington's planned $650 billion in defense spending.
Chen said China is more than two decades behind the U.S. in terms of military technology and Beijing needs to upgrade by adding new hardware such as aircraft carriers.
"China is a big country, and we have quite a number of ships, but these are only small ships and this is not commensurate with the status of a country like China," he said. "Of course I hope that in future we will have aircraft carriers."
Chen said a former Soviet-era aircraft carrier that China bought from Ukraine in 1998 was "a valuable thing" for China and it was being used for research and development purposes.


Chen criticized the U.S. for its recent military exercises with the Philippines and Vietnam, saying they should have been put off due to the heightened regional tensions. Mullen defended the operations as routine.
"The timing of those joint exercises was inappropriate," Chen said. "At this particular time, when China and the related claimants have some difficulties, have some problems with each other, the U.S. decides to hold such large-scale joint exercises ... at the very least this was bad timing."
Mullen countered that the exercises had been planned well in advance and that he wouldn't describe them as "large-scale," though he was open to a debate with Chen on the matter.
The host, Chen, took the last word, saying that even if the exercises were pre-planned, they could have been rescheduled.


Touche!


SOURCE (http://www.military.com/news/article/china-says-us-spends-too-much-on-military.html)

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

"If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people ... wouldn't that be a better scenario?" he said.

He does have a point here. But actually, it'll be smarter if America actually learns to control the cost of its military procurement.

"China is a big country, and we have quite a number of ships, but these are only small ships and this is not commensurate with the status of a country like China," he said. "Of course I hope that in future we will have aircraft carriers."
Chen said a former Soviet-era aircraft carrier that China bought from Ukraine in 1998 was "a valuable thing" for China and it was being used for research and development purposes.One must ask the question, what is "commensurate with the status of China?"

And he completely avoids the topic of China's correlation of forces vs other Asian nations (not counting US).

To be fair, the biggest problem is the post WWII military structure, which has many nations basically shedding the bulk of their military responsibilities to the United States. Basically, any large power (be it USSR or China) that is not aligned with the US block has a choice, to count the US in when calculating their force requirements or not.

Any solution that counts the US in results in a force that is overwhelming to the other nations, giving the US an excuse to intervene in the name of maintaining the power balance. Yet any solution that deliberately counts the US out reduces the force level to the point that they will be hopelessly vulnerable if the US chooses to intervene anyway.

The other, more China specific problem is its obsession with Taiwan. Basically, China has to maintain enough short range power projection to crush a medium military power, something that even the United States may find a bit hard. The consequences of maintaining or building up to such a posture to other nations is clear.

The host, Chen, took the last word, saying that even if the exercises were pre-planned, they could have been rescheduled.And what kind of message would that send?

[TLAM Strike]

The US has the highest GDP in the world (unless you count that mess called the EU a country). Since we have such a huge economy and society we spend a lot over all, so by extension all our government expenditures will be higher.

Now in terms of military expenditures as a % of GDP we are high but not even in the top ten. We rate #11 globally with 11 other countries within 1% below us.

China go pester Eritrea about their defense budget, they are spending over 20& of their income on it! They must be up to something! (http://thearkenstone.blogspot.com/2010/03/irans-military-relationship-with_06.html) :hmmm:

[Falkirion]

Yeah that ain't going to happen while China has the largest army in this region of the world. There are too many assets tied up in the area for them to not spend the money.

The thing I fear most is the day China decides to start a war and invades the entire south pac region.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

A possible solution to the problem, though one that will never be executed, would go like this:
1) The US agrees to withdraw from the Pacific all forward deployed forces, and also to severely limit the amount of forces they can temporarily deploy in the region (territorial restriction - quite frankly if they can restrict Soviet movements within their own territory in CFE I see no reason why a convention cannot restrict movement over international areas.

2) To maintain the military balance, it will transfer (over a period of years), a fraction of the equipment it currently holds in the Pacific to various nations she currently defends to maintain an agreed overall correlation of forces with China and b/w various Asian nations.

3) Because the equipment's various costs will significantly exceed the defence budgets of various nations, part of America's defence budget will be transferred to foreign aid dedicated to maintaining said military forces - the countries contribute the personnel and America contributes money.

4) The amount of foreign aid will be commensurate to China's military forces. To avoid an arms race or any worries that America's politicians will delay raising the amount of foreign aid in response to China's growth, the amount will be calculated automatically by pre-set formulae and curves (for example, for every carrier China builds, America will add enough aid to buy and run a wing of fighters ... etc). Alternatively, if China reduces forces in certain categories (such as long distance bombers), the formula will reduce the aid and force the various Asian nations to either shoulder the excess equipment themselves or downsize.

The formula may even take into account the occasional American intrusion in the area, since they constitute some military potential as well. So if America sends more occasional patrols as presence, China gets a bigger force without the commensurate increase in counteracting foreign aid.

5) Of course, if China actually attacks those nations, none of this prevents the US from rushing back in, though it'll a bit longer for them to do so.

[MothBalls]

"If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people ... wouldn't that be a better scenario?" he said.


Translation: Please buy more unnecessary Chinese crap so we can improve the livelihood of the Chinese people, including the Chinese military.

I vote we write them a bad check for our debt, then tell em to go pound sand if they don't like it.


Buy American, the job you save may be your own. (sigworthy)

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Translation: Please buy more unnecessary Chinese crap so we can improve the livelihood of the Chinese people, including the Chinese military.

I vote we write them a bad check for our debt, then tell em to go pound sand if they don't like it.

Buy American, the job you save may be your own. (sigworthy)

He did not say you can't buy American. But Americans will buy Chinese because they lack long term vision.

[GoldenRivet]

U.S. Says China needs to mind her own business and build more junk for wal mart.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

My, my, my, are Americans defensive when criticized on their military budget.

[TLAM Strike]

My, my, my, are Americans defensive when criticized on their military budget.
Remember the last time we drastically cut our military budget?

I think it was in 1919... :hmmm:

[Krauter]

My, my, my, China has no right to criticize US internal Policy....

[Armistead]

The last thing China wants to see is the US go belly up, they make too much in interest on all the money they loan us. Sad, we're supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but have to borrow from China.

So many US corporations do business in China creating the beginnings of a strong middle class why ours dies.

We don't have to worry about China, until we default and can't pay our debts to them..Oh, is that coming soon.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

My, my, my, China has no right to criticize US internal Policy....

She has no right to interfere with US policy. All countries are free to criticize each other's policies.

[Onkel Neal]

Personally, I think we should cut the military back a lot. Just get rid of everything but the nuke subs and ICBMs, and then expand the drones until we have 50,000 or so. That's all we need.

[Castout]

I tend to agree that US should probably cut military spending by a lot.

Instead of concentrating on 2 major wars eventuality maybe a single major war and another medium scale conflict or two small scale conflicts.

Cutting back vehicles, planes and lastly vessels should help.

But nothing like Neal suggested because drone doesn't provide deterrent since drone doesn't have a presence. Relying on drones for too much would probably risk war in Korea and Taiwan in immediate future. Maybe not Korea I can't see how North Korea could invade its South neighbor.

[Skybird]

The US has immense structural problems on several fronts. One of these problems is the immense interwoven relations between private defence industry and military . As long as that is so, and so many jobs lie in the defence industry, senators and governments will be extremely hesitent to cut back defence spendings. And if they would, job unemployement would go up pretty much comparable to the forecasted loss of tens of thousands of jobs along the shuttle coast and NASA country due to the Shuttle being decommissioned. US economy has never been switched back to peacetime production after WWII, but remained to depend on wartime production.

And for a country with so stellar debts like the US, referring to 5 of the GDP makes not as much sense anymore than it used to be. The total debt as % of GDP practically equalled the GDP and was almost 100% in 2010. Like in most Wetsern nations and in Germany as well, the inmherent debts are even higher, that means when counting future payment obligations by the state, for example pensions for future pensioners that currently still are working, and the interests the state needs to pay for the new credits it has to take for paying these pensions.. In Germany, this would mean that the official debts of 1.8 trillion would rise to over 5 trillion, if including such inherent future costs in the calculations. Don'T know how it is with the US, but I can't figure it to be any better, since the bureaucratic apparatus and the public service sector is not any smaller than in German society, is it.

Politicians should be threatened by death penalty to get involved in spending money of publif funds and taxes. Governments always spend more than the economy of their home nation can bring up. No m atter how rich, it never is enough, and all people agree that one should spend more than one can afford. Politicians have an interest to do actions pleasing people so that they get voted. So you have a classic interest conflict here. Maybe we should have a system with
1.) far less members (smaller population sizes, drastically smaller ones),
2.) politicians only haviong an option to make recommendations to regions on how to interact, but no power for binding orders, so that the decision-making remains where it should be, imo: in the local regions and on the low levels of the hierarchy of communal interaction. To have a legally binding limit of any kind to the number of existing laws and rules, also may be worth to be considered: no new law can be approved before another, older law gets deleted. the canon of rules and regulations needs to be observable and understandable for everybody both in numbers, and content.

Would be a very different world to live in, yes. But seeing how Western nations run from bancrupty to bancruptcy since many centuries and learn nothing from it, does not encourage me to consider our model of economy a success story. We are obsessed with the short time profit, but sacrifice longtime survivability for it. Since always. Practically all European states have gone bancrupt repeatedly in the past 5 or 6 centuries alone, some of them almost half a dozen times. Our basic model works...? (Not even starting to think about the environmental change our way to run economic business with our biosphere and natural resources is causing, and which has life threatening consequences for hundreds of millions in the world, and not even mentioning the cost in life due to corrupted global trade, hunger and diseases).

It'S all a mess that is FUBAR, and we are too damn many on this planet.

[Castout]

Euope is in trouble, US is in trouble. China has the largest foreign currency reserve atm. If China doesn't fall for the temptation of being and doing things excessively and they keep their economy growing as such and able to control corruption I must say they are in a very good position to be the world's only superpower in 30-40 year time with livelihood(and the decline in quality of life) in much of Europe and US becoming harder or much harder than they have been in past 20 year. US could become another Greece in the America continent.

:hmmm:

As it is their money brings them a lot of respect from both US and Europe. They can no longer be perceived as just another state.

[Skybird]

Euope is in trouble, US is in trouble. China has the largest foreign currency reserve atm. If China doesn't fall for the temptation of being and doing things excessively and they keep their economy growing as such I must say they are in a very good position to be the world's only superpower in 30-40 year time with livelihood in much of Europe and US becoming harder or much harder than they have been in past 20 year.

Earlier.

But superpowers - I would argue a superpower is somebody who has no rival containing him. There were no two superpowers, just two dominant global powers during the cold war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that made the US an apparent superpower for some years, it seemed nobody could compoete with its ficnial and economic power, and militariloy it seemed to be iinvincible. Then in recent years it's military and growing financial impotence and inherent economic disease has become evident, and it stopped to be a superpower. It will never be again. Also, China never will never be a superpower because I do not see - while they are in an economic climb - that they could ever acchieve a status of undisputed military global dominance. But saooner or later China will hit the same limitations like others before them.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

I think, in common usage, that 1 peerless power is called these days, a "hyper"power.

[Castout]

Earlier.

But superpowers - I would argue a superpower is somebody who has no rival containing him. There were no two superpowers, just two dominant global powers during the cold war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that made the US an apparent superpower for some years, it seemed nobody could compoete with its ficnial and economic power, and militariloy it seemed to be iinvincible. Then in recent years it's military and growing financial impotence and inherent economic disease has become evident, and it stopped to be a superpower. It will never be again. Also, China never will never be a superpower because I do not see - while they are in an economic climb - that they could ever acchieve a status of undisputed military global dominance. But saooner or later China will hit the same limitations like others before them.

Yeah in 10-20 years probably but they will probably only reach their apex in about 30 years or so.

If they are wise to learn from history they would not fall as others did. But greed and lust of power and corruption are always a universal vice.

[nikimcbee]

U.S. Says China needs to mind her own business and build more junk for wal mart.

:har:

"If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people ... wouldn't that be a better scenario?" he said.


:haha::haha::haha::haha::haha:

China says:" Barak, where's my money?" You pay now.

[nikimcbee]

China says to the bamster:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1_UMovaCwbI/Thuae4n3H1I/AAAAAAAABik/0vbfePbCXzI/s1600/kid%2Beating%2Bpeas.jpg