The US spends much of its defense budget on building expensive high-tech toys and maintaining 11 carrier strike groups, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:

* Making sure everyone loses a MAD nuclear war

* Maintaining undisputed naval dominance in five oceans.

* Bombing people on its imperial adventures all around the world.

* Offering security and protection in exchange for military and economic and political obeisance from its vassals and client states. [1]

North Korea spends much of theirs on artillery shells, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:

* Make themselves unattackable due to its small nuclear arsenal.

* Make themselves unprofitable to attack, due to holding a conventional-artillery Sword of Damocles over South Korea's cities.

* Being able to resist a ground invasion along a clearly-defined border.

It doesn't maintain more than a mothball air force, and a rag-tag brown-water navy, because both will be blown out of the sky, or the water within days of a shooting war breaking out.

It turns out that air forces and navies are very expensive to operate. Artillery, not so much, any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant.

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[1] The promise of security and protection turns out to have been written on tissue paper, because it can't even defend its own assets in a shooting war with a bankrupt regional power.

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scottyah 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The US spends most of its defense budget on:

* training, civilian salaries (where most veterans find jobs)

* maintenance of existing "toys" (aka money injected into local manufacturing, cleaning, painting, etc)

* Enlisted pay, benefits, housing

Then we get to procurement and R&D (which is just guaranteeing a job to people who finish college)

The whole active navy and world policing is just a side benefit.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/budget-explainer-national-defen...

	▲	cramsession 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Imagine if we were paying these people to improve the lives of US citizens and infrastructure instead of murder innocent people and cause massive ecological damage! Jesse Ventura had a very cool idea that the US should use its military to clean the world's oceans as reparations to the planet. Say what you will about him, but that is genuinely outside of the box thinking that can pull us out of our war culture death spiral.

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anton1982t 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Undisputed naval dominance in five oceans minus Hormuz straight.

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jcgrillo 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant

This makes artillery production fundamentally, physically different from nuclear bombs/subs/carriers or fighter jets too. The supply chain is highly distributive. You can choose to have thousands of distributed small factories each churning out artillery shells. They're pretty damn simple, and the materials and machinery input isn't very sophisticated. Contrast with the complexity of a modern aircraft carrier, submarine, fighter jet, or a nuclear weapon. That supply chain is far more vulnerable. So not only is it a lot cheaper, it's also a hell of a lot more durable.