War is an expensive business. Always has been, always will be. You have to pay to train your troops, pay for their weapons, pay for their transport, pay for their food, pay their wages and then they can go out and get killed and all that invested value will be gone.
As technology advances, the costs of fielding an army also advance. In ancient times, a fighting man needed a weapon, perhaps some personal protection and rations to subsist on while on campaign. These days, the average fighting person needs the weapon, the protection and the rations, however, they also need transportation, medicinal supplies, cultural training, support personnel and a million other things.
The complexity of the supplies used in war has also increased. In ancient times, armies could just bring livestock and grain with them and rely on the countryside they traveled through to provide anything they ran out of. Looting has become a culturally unacceptable practice, so the amount of rations brought has increased. The complexity of the ration has also increased.
It used to be that a can a baked beans would suffice for a meal, the meal would be eaten from the can and the soldier would just have to deal with it. These days MREs contain dehydrated food, condiment packs, desert items, cutlery and even a chemical heating unit to provide the soldier with a hot meal. I mean just look at the difference.
Note that there is a strawberry dairyshake powder packet. Yeah, I’d like to see Patton popping open a C-ration and chugging a milkshake.
I am not saying the soldiers today are more pampered or anything like that, but you have to admit that all of this complex space age food costs more than a tin of meat and beans.
There is also the difference of weaponry, let’s compare a WWII era weapons with a 2010 era weapon.
What we have here is the M1 Garand, one of the best rifles ever used by the US Military. It was reliable, rugged and accurate. Now let’s look at something a little newer.
This is the M4 Carbine, a modern rifle used by the US Military. Frankly, holy shit. Just look at all the shit you can bolt on to this damn thing. And all this stuff actually works together. Want a grenade launcher, a hollow stock, a sniper scope and a silencer, just go for it. Yeah, again, lots of very expensive stuff. And based on what some of my army buddies tell me, this thing is accurate as hell and if maintained properly, as reliable as anything on the planet.
You might be asking, where am I going with all of this? Military spending has gone up, really up. And it isn’t unreasonable spending mind you, you have to keep ahead of the other guy or he ends up with a bigger stick and ends up beating you up with it and you can’t stop him (or her, let’s be fair and balanced). But how high of a level of spending can a country afford to have?
If history has anything to teach, then it is that as technology advances and the cost of maintaining a given military force outpaces the resources of a country, then that country must make cuts. If the cuts are not possible due to military needs, then the country goes bankrupt.
The Roman West and the Byzantine East both show this at different times in history, but the result is always the same, you force the issue with spending that is not advisable and the entity doing the spending eventually falls.
So, the US Military can win any stand up, drag out fight, but the cost is so high that generations after the war end up paying for it. You can win every war you fight until you can no longer afford to pay to go to war and you lose by forfeit.
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