Eli5: Why is it that whenever we hear about “defense spending” it’s always on offensive things like weapons? Is there not a way to make actual defense the priority instead of offense?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.