Leonaerd wrote:The mindset of Americans is skewed on this one. We should be pissed that our military is "awesome" compared to Canada's. Think of how much money we spend on defense / offense / murder, and how little we get out of it. And yet... fox news....
It's a matter of dollars and diplomacy. We could function just as well if we focused on actual border defense, and little else.
Well some of it is a cultural thing too. I was looking at some numbers of men and women in uniform compared to population and while the US has 3 times as many armed forces personnel compared to Canada (editorial note that is per capita not absolute), they're on par with countries like the UK.
Frankly when you look at the origins of the US, you guys had a revolution to form your country, as opposed to Canada's evolved political seperation. You also fought the Spanish/Mexico for some of your territories and had a very bloody civil war. A military strong enough to deter foreign agression and protect US interests within and without has always been important to your national identity. Canada's history isn't as peaceful as a lot of Canadians like to believe but most of the conflicts were shorter duration and/or done as "their duty" to the British Empire (in conflicts like the Boer War in South Africa). Couple that with the results of last century's lessons from the World Wars:
In WWII Canada had 1.1 million men serving and lost 45,364. The total population of the country in 1945 was 12,072,000. Canada thus had a per capita loss rate of .376%. America's death rate in WWII was .21%.
In WWI Canada had 64,944 military casualties in a total population of 7.2 million. The per capita death rate was thus a wopping 0.9%. The US lost 53,402, in absolute numbers less, and the casualty rate was .054%.
In WWI the US entered the war on April 6th, 1917. Canada had been at war since August 14th, 1914. (Granted, Canada had no choice in the matter as it had to go to war when Britain did, but it didn't have to send as many men as it did. Granted, also, that there's a strong argument that the US should not have entered WWI, which was not a war about any great principles or against any great evil, despite the propaganda at the time.)
The above is from Ian Welsh's blog that Miir linked. I don't agree with everything he said in the blog (including the statement that Canada had no choice in entering WWI: there were treaty obligations but they still had to be ratified by our parliament) but the numbers are there. He doesn't mention that Canada entered WW2 26 months earlier than the US as well (declaring war shortly after the invasion of Poland in September of 1939) but the end conclusion is valid in that Canada bled hard in the World Wars (especially WW1) and that fact has shaped the nation's foreign policy after WW2, to try and avoid repetition.
Conversely, while Canada started to disarm after WW2, the US became the world's primary defender from the export of Bolshevism from the USSR to various points around the globe and never really came down from that war/near-war footing in some ways. We can argue about necessity of stopping Communist imperialism and the wisdom of intervening in places like Cuba, Vietnam or other places, but in the end its what happened. And there is no arguing about the willingness of the USSR to expand their borders whenever and however possible: Eastern Europe can bear testimony to that, from places like Poland and the Baltic States that were occupied during the war, or Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) that were occupied much later. The US acted as the counterweight to the Soviets for many years, and for all we like to decry some of the interventions on behalf of gov'ts that were notably corrupt (like the South Vietnamese or propping up Pinochet in Chile), the US led the way in countering the communist plan for a world wide revolution of the proletariat (presumably governed from their Utopian headquarters in the USSR).
Now is it "fair" that the US has had to bear so much of the burden? Probably not but they haven't been alone in it: they've just been the biggest part. Can the US step away from this role? Probably not until someone else is willing to take up the mantle and that requires a population base and the resources to sustain a military that few other nations have, even in cooperation with their neighbours/allies.
