Combat Power, Conflict Resolution, and US Economy

[Fuchs]

I'll never get why Americans are so much focused on national military power while being allied or befriended with the majority of foreign military power.


Well, if you really want to look at the economical underpinnings of U.S. military power, look first at the U.S. shipbuilding industry. It's going to be a tough search for a needle in a haystack.

The U.S. produces
* few overpriced warships, none of them are competitive export produces
* Great Lakes ships that will never see an ocean
* leisure yachts
* a couple oil rig servicing boats and ships
* not much else

Its shipbuilding industry is rated lower than the one of such great historical naval power as Poland or Croatia. In fact, almost all (about 80%) of global shipbuilding is concentrated in East Asia.
Don't bring up the supposed special skills of military shipyards versus civilian ones; getting cables wrong, do poor welding, deliver late and over priced are not desirable special skills. Besides; 20 semi-mil spec hulls beat one mil spec hull.


edit: I may have been too subtle.

Yes, it's call GDP. The more you have, the more military you can afford.

A look at the GDP is useless in this topic. What counts are
* economic sustainability (at the very least balanced trade and an appropriate net capital investment; the U.S. has neither)
as the background of military spending
* the size and composition of the share of the economy that can convert to a wartime economy
(electronics, machine building, chemicals, metal industries, resource production, automotive industries, shipbuilding, aerospace industries)

The GDP includes -especially in partially de-industrialised countries such as the U.S., France or the UK- a far too great share of irrelevant economic output. You're not going to win a war with the economic output of investment bankers, car washers, lawyers, fast food servants, mobile phone services, website designers or coiffeurs.