ESSAY Military Spending Is It Justified
Examine the extent to which expenditure on arms and the armed forces is justifiable in the modern world. !
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With all its wars, terrorist attacks and genocides, history might suggest that the armed forces has a critical and unquestionable role in any nation-state. However, as Steven Pinker puts it “We believe our world is riddled with terror and war, but we may be living in the most peaceable era in human existence’. Since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and 80s, organised conflicts of all kinds, such as civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attacks, have declined throughout the world and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously. Despite the trend of the New Peace, world military expenditure in 2013 is estimated to have reach $1.747 trillion and 2012 saw the highest total military spending than in any year since World War 2. Are these military spendings a good return on its national-security “investment’, for it is clearly an investment intended for peace and security. This essay aims to show that expenditure on arms and armed forces are justifiable in the modern world to a very small extent because it facilitates violence, results in power imbalance and its money can be put to better use. !
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First, expenditure on arms and armed forces is not justifiable as such military spendings facilitate violence and thus violates human rights. Countries without military capability cannot easily undertake “wars of choice” or wars whose purposes evolve, as in Iraq, from dismantling wars of mass destruction to promoting democracy. The last five major wars that the United States undertook, namely Korea 1950, Vietnam 1955, Kuwait 1990, Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003 were the ones in which the United States attacked countries that had not directly attacked the United
States. Furthermore, wars involving powers that have the military and economic capability allows for such conflicts to exist for prolonged periods of time. For
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With all its wars, terrorist attacks and genocides, history might suggest that the armed forces has a critical and unquestionable role in any nation-state. However, as Steven Pinker puts it “We believe our world is riddled with terror and war, but we may be living in the most peaceable era in human existence’. Since the peak of the cold war in the 1970s and 80s, organised conflicts of all kinds, such as civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, terrorist attacks, have declined throughout the world and their death tolls have declined even more precipitously. Despite the trend of the New Peace, world military expenditure in 2013 is estimated to have reach $1.747 trillion and 2012 saw the highest total military spending than in any year since World War 2. Are these military spendings a good return on its national-security “investment’, for it is clearly an investment intended for peace and security. This essay aims to show that expenditure on arms and armed forces are justifiable in the modern world to a very small extent because it facilitates violence, results in power imbalance and its money can be put to better use. !
!
First, expenditure on arms and armed forces is not justifiable as such military spendings facilitate violence and thus violates human rights. Countries without military capability cannot easily undertake “wars of choice” or wars whose purposes evolve, as in Iraq, from dismantling wars of mass destruction to promoting democracy. The last five major wars that the United States undertook, namely Korea 1950, Vietnam 1955, Kuwait 1990, Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003 were the ones in which the United States attacked countries that had not directly attacked the United
States. Furthermore, wars involving powers that have the military and economic capability allows for such conflicts to exist for prolonged periods of time. For