TRUMP 2016

[Loki]

Think about what military healthcare and pensions mean. It means you spent a lot on the military in the past. It says nothing about your current military capabilities.

[wiggin]

Think about what military healthcare and pensions mean. It means you spent a lot on the military in the past. It says nothing about your current military capabilities.

It all depends on why you're trying to measure defense spending. If you want to understand its effect on federal budgets, economic growth, etc. you'll probably want a broad measure. If you want an understanding of current capabilities, you'll probably want to see a history of spending on a narrower measure in the past 10 or 20 years, combined with other data on equipment and readiness. That narrower measure probably wouldn't include retiree healthcare or pensions, but it probably also shouldn't include things like current payroll (a couple hundred billion a year IIRC) and parts of OCO-type funding - fuel and munition expenditures for operations do not contribute to readiness or capability. The narrower measure would probably just need to cover equipment, logistics capacity, training, etc.

That's part of why the 2% number is so ill-defined and open to gaming (and also why it's so ridiculous that countries can't meet it). A country can have very inefficient defense spending - say, spending a lot on poorly trained troops, or bespoke weapons systems purchased in small quantities, or whatever. Most of NATO members are guilty of this; they should pool resources for shared high end capabilities and focus on scale and interoperability over each country having its own complete (and tiny) force structure. The big players (US, Germany, France, UK, maybe a couple others) can aspire to this ambition but most of the rest shouldn't waste their time.