Why does the US spend so much on its military?

let me show you how much the United States spends on its military over here you've got Russia China India and other big military powers and yet if you combine them all into one the US still spends more more than the next 10 countries combined but I'm interested in what happens inside of this circle like what are we spending our money on [Music] in here we'll see everything that the military spends their money on from salaries for soldiers to elementary schools for their children we'll see the $21 million helicopters and these missiles that cost $1. 6 million each and we'll see how much the Pentagon spends on the development of new weapons new technologies like these ship-based laser weapons and of course the most expensive of all the F35 fighter jet that will end up costing the taxpayers $2 trillion we even made a little model of this guy and like the real thing the model is continually breaking down no here we go the door thing is really hard to put it yeah of all the money our Congress budgets to run our government On Any Given year almost half of it goes to the military here you've got education and there's diplomacy and health science energy environment we've been deep in the spreadsheets and the data luckily all this stuff is pretty public and open to scrutiny with the goal of visualizing all of this trying to understand where the money goes to understand why the US spends so much more than any other country on its military and most important of all to try to answer the question of whether all of this money actually makes us safer almost all of our Witnesses before the armed services committee tell us that we are in the most dangerous Global threat security since Generations this is the pentagon's budget for 2023 it's how they planned to spend money that Year it turns out that how much they spend on defense is pretty complicated and Depends a lot on who you ask so go to the sources you can see how we got all these numbers and what decisions we made the total number we got was $853 billion that's more than the entire economy of Switzerland let's take a brain break because I want to talk about another kind of budget an annoying part of my personal budget which is subscriptions you know what I'm talking about we all subscribe to things that every month charge us a little bit of money not enough for us to pay attention to it but enough to add up over time there's a lot of companies whose main business model is hoping that you'll sign up for something and then forget that you signed up up so that they can charge you every month this is super annoying and really hard to keep track of luckily there's a solution and that solution is rocket money who is the sponsor of today's video you give rocket money access to your bank feed and it fishes out all the reoccurring subscriptions that you're paying for unless you see them all in one place and you can easily just cancel them I recently found that I have been subscribed to all of these local newspapers that I subscribe to because I need to read a story like in some other country and like I subscribe and then I forget about it and it's only like three bucks a month but it adds up I'm subscribed to tons of these and I didn't know but with rocket money you can see it all one place it's so easy it also saves me time in going through the often cumbersome process of trying to cancel these subscriptions and one other thing which is that they will help you negotiate your bills to be lower like for example a lot of us are paying too much for internet we could get a lower rate on our monthly internet bill rocket money knows this and they know how to get that number down if it's possible so it's subscription cancellations it's negotiating your bill down and it will just analyze your finances and pull out Trends and insights that it sees within your spending habits you can set budgets and the app will notify you if you exceed those budgets so between these three smart features rocket money has saved their customers up to $740 a year they've processed $500 million in canceled subscriptions sort of gives you an idea of like how big of a deal this is so if you want to save money you can try this out for free if you go to the link in my description it is rocket money. com Johny Harris you can get started for free or you can unlock more features with their premium option either way the whole thing's meant to save you money so you will come out having saved money if you do this if you are going to sign up for this please use my link if you don't use the link then rocket money won't know if you found them through this and that's like pretty important to running the business here and doing these videos okay now that I've been talking about my personal budget let's get back to the budget of the military of the United States it's a lot so let's start to break it [Music] down close to half of all of this money goes to the vague sounding category of operations and maintenance this is $352 billion that we spend just on om&m that's like larger than the entire economy of Portugal like just to create the report to get all these numbers assembled in one place cost the dod $269,000 but also credit to the Pentagon and the US government for giving us all of this very clear data that we can shine a light on and scrutinize a lot of countries aren't this transparent so anyway operations and maintenance this is like all the costs required to keep the Department of Defense one of the largest organizations in the world running it's a lot of not very sexy stuff like Transportation fuel maintenance of equipment administrative costs training expenses it includes $39 billion just for the doctors and Health Services for active duty personnel and it also covers the stuff that you don't really think about when you think of military spending like environmental cleanup in areas that the military has left unexploded bombs or spilled chemicals in the local environment it also includes disaster relief and humanitarian money which is something the military does as well here's nearly a billion dollars dedicated to anti-drug activities and here's $ million for security at International sporting competitions this huge category also captures the cost to run every one of the US's approximately 1,250 military bases including the approximately 800 bases that are not in the United States that are in other countries which by the way are quite expensive to run because the US military has basically created a slice of America in these other countries you've got Pizza Hut and McDonald's and Subway and grocery stores with products flown from the United States to make military personnel serving abroad feel like they're right at home okay but let's just pause right here on this map because this is a good moment to recognize that the United States military is not a normal Army it is not a normal military most militaries are tasked with protecting their country securing their borders but the US military is so much more than that it sprawls out out throughout the entire Globe giving the US control over every corner of the planet allowing the US to be the global policeman where it enforces the rules and Norms of the system that it created and from which it benefits immensely so one quick answer to this big question of why the United States spends so much more on its military is actually pretty simple because this is the cost of being the global hegemon the one who gets to enforce the rules and maintain control over the globe okay but let's keep going on our budget that's the point of the [Music] video the next big category here is people military personnel $172 [Music] billion pay benefits retirement healthc care for the over 3.

4 million soldiers reservists and civilian military personnel by some estimates the Department of Defense is the largest employer in the world though it depends on how you count it the Pentagon also spends a lot of money on recruiting new Talent like the $28 million that they spent on hiring experts who work in artificial intelligence next the military spends $140 billion on research and development and a reminder I know that these numbers are abstract and billion doesn't mean anything to anyone but like $140 billion that's the entire ire economy of Morocco that the Pentagon spends on R&D thinking about the future with the goal of maintaining technological superiority on the battlefield meaning they're working on new tech it's a huge part of what the Pentagon does now a lot of this stuff is classified but we do know that the Pentagon is spending money on stuff like AI using AI to analyze Drne footage to improve their targeting capabilities building autonomous submarines or these insane military lasers that they use at Sea to attack other ships for years they've also been trying to develop this exoskeleton that will supercharge the abilities of their soldiers allow them to carry more weight over long periods of time although this technology while potentially promising isn't really there yet but it might be soon now the Pentagon pours a lot of investment into these Technologies for the battlefield but sometimes this Tech actually turns into stuff that we use every day like GPS drones voice recognition the computer Mouse and the internet itself are all technologies that were first developed at least in part by the US military the worldwide web or the web was created for and by the United States Department of Defense let's quickly look at this smallest of the categories still $19 billion but compared to all these other ones it's pretty small this is construction building new facilities both at home and abroad like this little project $85 million for jet fuel tanks in Japan supporting force projection in the Pacific or it looks like they're proposing $75 million to spend on a new operation Support Facility in Southern California and finally we get to the part of the budget that you probably think about when you think of military spending procurement $67 billion the entire economy of Ethiopia to purchase all of this okay I've always known that military stuff is expensive but now I really know it let's look at some of this stuff this jet costs around $142 million the US bought 77 of them in 2023 and is asking for another $14 billion to buy 83 more this year and they're pretty spendy to fly too look at these four cruise missiles parachuting out of a plane each one of these missiles cost $1. 6 million oh and the American taxpayer bought 600 of them last year this vehicle cost3 $372,000 it's used to move troops around the battlefield last year we bought about 3,700 of them and this year we wanton another 3,100 $2. 8 billion buying 24 of these f-15s for the Navy this is going to cost $7.

3 billion $1. 2 billion for these 56 Blackhawk helicopters for the Army $8. 2 billion for three Destroyer class shiping the same rep $2.

2 billion I mean it's a lot and these are just a few tiny little samples I'm just scratching the surface and in fact this diagram that looks so complex and granular is also highly simplified and condensed each one of these categories actually contains billions of tiny little things inside of [Music] it this organization is much bigger than we could ever fathom and in fact it's much bigger than the Pentagon itself self can even fathom the the Pentagon has up until this point in 2024 never successfully passed an audit the American taxpayers want to know how our tax dollars are getting spent and the fact that the the department that's getting such a huge chunk of the federal budget can't account for all of the dollars it's getting is definitely a problem for 6 years in a row now the Pentagon has failed to pass an independent audit they've brought in a bunch of accountants and said tell us where all of our stuff is and what we spend our money on and the accountants say no we can't do it 61% of their physical assets are missing they don't know where they are which means they're probably investing a lot of money in stuff that they already have and they just don't know it but my bigger question here is why the United States pulled out of Afghanistan a few years ago the war in Iraq is over but spending continues to go up and spending went down for like a split second but look it's going up again okay well first off remember what we talked about earlier the US is not a normal country with a regular military the US is the global hegemon who uses its military to assert control and Order over every corner of the globe but there's another reason why this budget is so high and this reason is much more infuriating to [Music] me what our little graph here doesn't reveal is that most of this money is going to private corporations who get 466 billion of these dollars about 54% and once again the US government tells us exactly which corporations they give all this money to we pulled the last 19 years worth of data on these private contractors at the top of this list you start to see the same names over and over rathon General Dynamics Boeing northr Grumman locked Martin these are the names at the top of these lists year after year there used to be a lot of different defense contractors but over the last three decades they got gobbled up by these big five transitioning from the words of the Pentagon from 51 to five Aerospace and defense Prime contractors as a result the dod is increasingly reliant on a small number of contractors for Critical Defense capabilities I. E we've got kind of a monopoly issue on our hands these five contractors own the space and the Pentagon can't really go elsewhere if they need an F-35 there's only one shop in town that makes it for this reason the prices can get pretty out of control like the Pentagon used to pay $25,000 for this stinger missile and now they pay nearly half a million dollar for the same missile the price went up more than 16 times in just a couple decades it's a little more than inflation there's a history of Defense contractors overcharging the US government they can overcharge uh if they're the only company producing a a certain widget then there's no competition and that's one of the problems with Monopoly is if there's not competition it's easy to overcharge the buyer in addition the the Inspector General of the Department of Defense has found routinely that there's overcharging through corruption and waste and fraud and there have been lawsuits uh for example KBR is a contractor that's been used overseas and they were found to overcharge um in dining Halls by 30 to 40% it's also why a pentagon inspector realized that the Pentagon was paying Boeing yes that Boeing $3,357 for one ball bearing a small little piece that the Pentagon could actually get for $15 in their own Warehouse $15. 42 to be precise when the Pentagon does get around to investigating these contractors they sometimes find that they're taking huge profits like 40 to 50 50% profit margins giving them hundreds and millions of dollars above what they should be making in any kind of typical business environment and what do they do with all these profits well they pay their Executives very well but this list also tells us what they do this is a list of how much money these defense contractors spend to influence our lawmakers into spending more money on the military so that these companies can make more money you can see right here that locked Martin is at the top of the list so far this year in this election cycle loed Martin has spent $2.