OP here.

It's a well written post that cites a lot of facts with very little in the way of citations. I'll grant most of the facts, but I think he makes a few points that don't really hold water.

Thanks. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to go cite every link, since I was in a rush at the time - I can provide you those links easily if people want them.

The stuff about the aircraft carriers is from how the Navy operates as there is no one single document or OPNAV that covers every aspect of naval strategy today.

This is almost entirely nonsense. Calculating defense spending as a percentage of GDP is useless. If GDP goes up, the percentage goes down. That tells us nothing other than we're engaged in more economic activity. Or as ThinkProgress put it:

I was going to respond to this, but /u/EatingSteak covers it quite well in his post here and by /u/Panzerdrek right here

That said, your quote from ThinkProgress falls into a pitfall - no citation is made beyond the author's opinion on why % of GDP is a bad measure when it is regularly used by economists to measure how a nation/state/society chooses to allocate its resources.

In fact, the ThinkProgress article states:

In no way does measuring defense spending as a percentage of GDP accurately represent the capabilities of our military to execute its missions.

Which is not at all what my OP was about. In fact, using % of GDP as a measure of a military's effectiveness is pointless - North Korea spends a ridiculous amount of its GDP on its military and it isn't close to the power of the US or even Russia, which spends a similar % as the US but still lags behind the US.

What my post was about though was that, corrected for factors such as differences in raw GDP (and thus the use of percentages) and cost of living, the US's spending isn't nearly as far ahead of the rest of the world as people like to bring up.

In actual inflation-adjusted budget terms, US defense spending is not at "it's lowest spending levels on national defense since the days before WW2." It's much, much higher. Here's the Washington Post on the issue.

Which is why % of GDP is a very meaningful factor - in that same time, the US inflation-adjusted GDP has increased by magnitudes to go along with the massively increased federal budget.

In fact, WaPo falls into the same pitfall as ThinkProgress, when it concludes:

The cost of defending a country from attack shouldn't necessarily vary with population or the economy; after all, a wealthier country and a more populous country isn't necessarily more vulnerable to attack. The best comparison seems to be using inflation-adjusted spending, but the inflation adjustments going on in the first chart above are all screwy

With no reason for why that is the best comparison while dismissing the other methods off hand, this seems like a pretty shallow method as it makes no mention of changes in national interests or security policy.

Personnel costs for the military budget were $153.531 billion of a $610.096 billion budget. Add in a billion and a half for housing costs and you're looking at just over 25% of the budget, not 40%.

Look at what you quoted again - I said "wages and benefits and training" for which training falls under the Operations and Maintenance category of the GPO breakout. That segment alone accounts for over 42% of the budget. Combined, it's over 2/3rds.

In fact, straight from the defense.gov website:

Approximately two-thirds of the requested budget ($336.3 billion) pays for the Department’s day-to-day operations, including pay and benefits for 1.3 million active military personnel, 0.8 million Reserve and Guard personnel, and 0.7 million civilian personnel, as well as healthcare benefits for over 9 million beneficiaries, both active and retired. Also included are funds for training, logistics, fuel, maintenance, service contracts, administration, family housing, and much more.

In fact, my 40% for wages + benefits + training might be too low - from whitehouse.gov, in the proposed budget in 2012, $172 billion out of $553 billion was for "training and readiness" or 31% of the budget. So we're talking over 50% just for those, with less than 1/3rd of the overall budget spent on procurement - which was split 60/40 between actual procurement and RDT&E (Research, Development, Test & Evaluation), according to the GPO website

Also, funny enough, the Census provides a figure on just personnel costs to include costs to civilian wages and retiree pay, which is spread across categories besides military personnel in the GPO analysis. This data from the Census is pulled from the DOD page, which unfortunately you'll need a CAC card to access.

Sure enough, the totals are about 36% of the annual budget with the GPO having only calculated active + reserve/guard pay under military personnel.

Either way you look at it, the numbers are correct and if anything, 40% was too generous if the full extent of training is included.

"The luxury of conscription" is a pretty gross phrase considering he means an enforced military draft no one in the US wants. And having a smaller population than China or India is meaningless in this context. Our total active-duty military is larger than India's and our per-capita military enrollment is larger than both country's.

The "luxury of conscription" was directed at countries where personnel wages are dirt cheap and enable more of their budget focused on other areas, such as procurement. Combined with lower relative cost of living in a lot of countries, their personnel costs are a much smaller part of their militaries budgets - meaning they spend a smaller share on upkeep.

The high population further drives down wages as there is an ample supply of people to fill the ranks. In fact, while China's budget is a closely guarded secret, the most recent estimate I read (unfortunately, this is one you'll only find on think tank reports that aren't always published in electronic form) had China spending only 2/3rd as much as India on personnel and somewhere between 30-40% on procurement of new systems.

For instance, India spends approximately 33% of its entire budget on procurement and 5% on R&D. China is estimated at ~40%.

This isn't a neutral argument, and has a large, unstated ideological bent to it.

I'm just trying to present the numbers to you and pointing out that the analysis of "we're spending too much money!" often ignores the crux of the issue:

Our strategic goals decide our spending and not the other way around.

So everytime I hear people say "but we need to stop ISIS/Boko Haram/North Korea" but also say "we shouldn't have invaded Iraq/Afghanistan/whatever" I have to remind them that doing the former requires the capability for the latter.