In the United States of America, as in every other country in the world, there is an ongoing debate as to where the government's money should go and how much should be put towards a given interest. Since every country must have some sort of defense to enjoy any kind of prosperity, one of the main issues at hand is naturally how much money should be spent on the military. The United Sates has, throughout its history and especially since World War II, spent a great deal of money on defense. Everything from the clothes a soldier wears to a nuclear warhead, the U.S. has spent an enormous sum of money on its armed forces. A more recent debate that has been hitting home lately in America is not whether or not we should spend money on our military, but whether or not we spend enough. Many people argue that what we currently spend is adequate, or even too much, and America will continue to be a world power without an increase in military spending. Others, however, feel that in order to remain so prosperous it is necessary to go one big step further and increase our military spending to ensure national security. It seems that the ladder opinion is a wiser one, and this paper is going to explain exactly why this is the case. .
Many people in America feel that since we are not currently involved in any major wars and the cold war is over we don't need to increase military spending. They feel a certain sense of security as is. Other factors, such as China taking a more capitalistic economic approach and recent military successes in Kosovo and Dessert Storm contribute to this feeling of comfort and satisfaction with our current military spending. But there are in reality many reasons Americans should not be quite so confident. .
With the absence of the paradoxical stability that the threat of all out war between two ideologically driven alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) brought with it, most analytic communities now agree that many new or older, revitalized threats have emerged to endanger the democracies of the West and that this re-emergence is categorized by a gross lack of predictability in addition to a great variety (The Terrorist Research Center 1).
