I could be missing the point about military spending, and the five-year-old in my head asking the question does just want forcefields over every country in the end.
In: Technology
Turtling up just means you slow down your defeat – or at least make it a drawn out mess until your attacker runs out of money or gets bored.
The best method for stopping an attack since prehistoric times has been grabbing a big ol club and krumping whoever is harassing you. Of course if you screw up your krumping strategy you *might* spend the next twenty years throwing lives and money into a bottomless pit in a desert on the other side of the globe.
Edit: also calling it the “defense budget” instead of the “attack budget” has better PR looks.
It’s just semantics. It sounds less aggressive if it’s called defense spending. Offensive wars are generally frowned upon by international law (such as it is), plus, many more people are likely to support military spending when you say it’s for defense (after all, who doesn’t want to feel safe and protected?), so it’s largely a public relations thing.
On a more practical note though, there’s a fair amount of overlap between offensive and defensive weapons. The very same gun used to slaughter innocent people in cold blood (an offensive act) can be used to kill the person doing the slaughtering (a defensive act). It’s enough of a grey area that people can argue cruise missiles are defensive weapons (although whether or not you buy that is up to you).
Short answer, we do but offensive measures are flashier and get more press while being less classified.
Nixon also signed an absolutely boneheaded treaty with Russia that we could only have one hundred Anti Ballistic Missile emplacements to protect a single target. I don’t honestly believe that either side honored that treaty, but just signing it was stupid
We also have defensive emplacements in every NATO country to catch and kill attacks on us and out allies.
Something not touched upon by anyone so far is the fact that defensive technologies of sufficient efficacy do not exist, if defense against a particular threat is even possible.
Someone walks up to you, shoots at you, what’s the defense? A bunker? Apart from now having to essentially flee from your pre-war life, arguably the the first “loss” of the war, you are sitting in a bunker where the enemy can attack you at their leisure.
Modern technology such as it is, we can breach bunkers. You’re actually better protected when the enemy doesn’t know where you are, but if you’re not stopping boots on the ground (at the least) from searching for you, you don’t stay hidden for long, and this ignores the fact that you can’t hide the people of a country nor their assets (survive but have a destroyed economy, yay).
The only way to protect your people is to eliminate the enemies will and ability to prosecute (go after) your people. You can’t do that using defensive technologies, because we don’t have forcefields and limitless power. You have to launch more missiles than they fire at you to have a good probability of shooting them down. You can mine a road, but if you don’t harass the enemy then they can disarm it at their pleasure.
I understand that this question comes from a place of good natured ignorance, but I daresay that this question did come from the five year old in your head, because it just makes no sense.
It’s the principle of “The best defense is a good offense”… being so formidable that no opponent would dare attack.
This is kinda lengthy, so TLDR: any sort of weapons tech spending, offensive or defensive, can or will be viewed as a threat by other states. So it doesn’t really matter what the US spends its “defense” budget on.
It’s funny that you mention shields, because recently the US has been interested in constructing a missile defense shield, but the international community (mostly Russia and China) basically said “fuck no,” because then they’d feel compelled to invest a bunch of money into their own missile defense shields, which they probably don’t want to spend their money on. (This is kind of a Drunk History telling of this example so if someone wants to correct me if I’m wrong about how this all played out please feel free to commenting).
They actually have a name for this in international relations. It’s called the “security dilemma,” which means that any action taken to make yourself feel more secure will be viewed as a threat by other states (and then they also start taking steps to make them more secure and so on and so forth until you get an arms race).
One thing the professors always use is to imagine you have a castle. One day you decide “hey, I want to make my castle safer, so I’m going to build a moat.” A nearby castle-owner sees this and goes “well shit, I wonder what they’re planning. I should build a moat too just in case.” You, seeing this, now get suspicious as well, so you build a wall around your castle for an extra layer of safety. This goes back and forth until both of you have guards, an army, and big weapons pointed at each other “just in case.” The weapons are used for defense, even though they could kill several people (unlike a wall)
So basically, any sort of “defense” spending, even if it’s truly defensive (like a shield) will be seen as potentially offensive and thus menace other states. So even if we invest in technology that won’t harm anyone, no states are going to feel safer. I think I saw another commenter say that it’s really just semantics, and if you go by this theory, then it pretty much is.
I’m not sure if this answered your question completely, but I hope it sorta helped illustrate how it all works.
Because such a defensive system do not exist in real life. I know that you didn’t meant real forcefields, but there isn’t much of anything else that could do similar job.
There is still some item in the military that serve a defensive purpose like anti-air defense that are there to protect the country against air attack. Weirdly enough, nuclear weapons brough more peace that any defensive system in history. The fear of mutal destruction had a powerful effect of calming everybody down.
“Defense Spending” is brand messaging for “Military Spending” and “Military Contractor Spending”.
If you phrase it as “defense” the masses are more willing to shovel the hundreds of billions to the military (and military contractors) each year as they think it’s defending them, keeping them safe. It also makes people more resistant to cutting military spending, as they’re primed to think getting rid of defense will put them and their family in mortal peril.
It doesn’t get talked about in the same terms, but Foreign Aid budgets are at least to some extent a form of defensive spending. No one wants to attack you if you’re helping to keep their bellies full.
Operating in a siege mentality is ultimately self defeating, being able to take the fight to your enemy transitioning to offense is how you win.
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