As we all know, although the United States has the largest military spending in the world, its military spending is often insufficient. A large number of key projects lack funding for research, new types of weapons and equipment. The most typical example is that the Americans plan to produce various advanced weapons against China, but these advanced weapons are not equipped because of these problems. Some weapons have even been delayed until 2035, including but not limited to sixth-generation fighters, next-generation main destroyers, full-fledged electromagnetic catapult carriers, hypersonic missiles, and more.
In the past, when the United States was conducting military exercises, it pulled all these weapons that only existed in the plan onto the map to deal with the existing military strength of the mainland, and it was worthy of a disastrous victory. However, even in this case, the Americans have not been able to increase the pace of research on new types of weapons. So the next question is, what about the money? The United States spends so much military spending every year, which is the sum of the world's second to tenth largest military spenders, so what about the money? Not to mention China, Gerasimov can use 5 trillion rubles, or 60 billion US dollars, to buy Russia more than 300 new fighter planes, more than 1,000 of the latest T-90 tanks, and a variety of advanced hypersonic missiles.
Compared with 2000, China's military spending has only tripled, but its spending on arms procurement has increased eightfold, and in recent years, a new generation of warships and fighter jets has been installed, and the Americans' military spending is 10 or even 15 times that of the Russians and Chinese.
First of all, the U.S. military has a huge problem of wasting military spending, and a large amount of U.S. military spending cannot be accounted for, and it has failed to pass the audit for seven consecutive years. Among them, sky-high coffee cups and sky-high toilet paper have become the favorite jokes of military fans, and it can be said that everyone knows it.
Second, the US military has an extremely large arsenal of old equipment and weapons, and the average age of US fighters is 32 years old, and the age of naval ships is 40 years old. But generally speaking, the normal age of jet aircraft should be scrapped at about 15 years old on average, and warships should be gradually retired after about 30 years.
There is a serious problem with old equipment, that is, the cost of use and maintenance is several times higher than that of new equipment. In order to maintain this equipment, the United States had to shell out huge sums of money.
This falls into a paradox: the United States has no new equipment, so it can only use old equipment, and the more old equipment is used, the more expensive it becomes, resulting in a squeeze on the research and development of new equipment.
Third, global deployment results in high maintenance costs. The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was part of the savings. It's just that there are too many military bases of the US military at present, and it is not that you can save money by pulling out an Afghan base.
Fourth, deindustrialization. Deindustrialization has led to a crazy rise in the cost of weapons procurement in the United States, but the relative efficiency of weapons delivery is very low, because the supply chain is not in the hands of the United States, and the United States has no way to launch socialized production, improve the production efficiency of equipment, and reduce production prices.
This happened to the United States when it resumed the production of Javelin and Stinger missiles, and many manufacturers of necessary parts went out of business, and the same type of parts could only rely on imports. The U.S. military has openly stated that for every $1 spent by the Chinese military, it can achieve the effect of $20 spent by the U.S. military. This is the result of deindustrialization.
In the 30 years from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of China, the United States' military strength was invincible in the world, so the direction of their research and development of weapons was to meet the needs of various street battles and public security warfare, and they did not study the weapons of strategic decisive battles between countries.
Now that China has risen, the United States has thought about it, and in order to catch up with China's progress, the United States has violated scientific laws and tried to speed up equipment research and development, which led to the electromagnetic catapult system on the Ford-class aircraft carrier, and then to the large number of F-35 models that were installed before they were finalized, the B-21 entered mass production without full test flight, and the failure of the US military in the hypersonic weapons program. As a result, the equipment research and development work has fallen into a vicious circle of one wrong step and one wrong step.
The last reason is inflation, in fact, China also has this problem, but China only has this one problem, and Americans have six problems.
At present, the number of Chinese troops has dropped from 6 million to 2 million, and the money saved is basically used to develop new weapons and equipment and build strategic logistics reserves. Not only is China's actual spending power on military spending stronger, but it has always been able to use good steel on the cutting edge. This is one of the core reasons why China's military power is now developing faster than the United States.
Americans expect that by 2027, China's military power will officially surpass that of the United States. This proves that the development of the Chinese armed forces is on the right path.