Nuklear bomb

[Blackdog_kt]

I can't really discriminate between the US political spectrum, as i lack the experience of living there. What it seems like is that each party's presidents fight wars with different justifications and different means. Also, the main difference during the past decade has been the choice of front, with Democrat administrations favoring pro-muslim involvement in the Balkans as a means to curb the pro-Russian nations and Republicans favoring involvement in the middle east.

As for the economic problems in Greece, there's a variety of causes. A big one is nepotism and corruption in the higher echelons. It might be hard to believe, but even with state-run education, health care and pension programms, our debts were non-existent until the early 80s and very manageable until the mid-90s. It was the entry into the Euro-zone that made it very easy to borrow money, coupled with the "usual suspects" who descended on government funds like locusts that brought the situation where it is today. The vast majority of the people being called upon to contribute in limiting the debt had no involvement whatsoever in its creation.

One of the main reasons however is that a nation of 10 million has to sustain a modern military of 100000 just to maintain a credible deterrent and that's still being out-numbered 7 to 10, having to rely on operational planning and geography to ensure parity in the event of a conflict. As a comparison, Germany is a nation of 70 million and they have 200000 military personell. This is done with extensive use of conscription as there are no funds for a 100% professional army and it incurres great debts on society as a whole, not only directly in money but also in affecting the working life of every male in the country, as well as human lives.

Economically speaking, a farmer who's a father of three boys can count on about 3 years of work-hours being lost from the family due to his sons' army obligations and that's with today's reduced terms of 9 and 12 months (dependant on service branch), as terms used to be 18 to 25 months a few years ago.
There's also the cost fuel, maintenance and ammunition for exercises and maneuvers, as well as the fact that our air force is involved in intercepting the air force of another NATO member daily over our islands, the same ones that tourists flock to during the summer. It's not unusual to be having a swim and hear jet engines overhead in the distance.

Since 1976 when these overflights started, the cost of jet fuel alone for these very much operational flights has reached tens or even hundreds of millions of Euros.
And finally, there's operational and training accidents, many times involving conscripts. Also, despite having one of the lowest accident rates even when having such a rigorous schedule, when accidents do happen they seem to happen all at once. In the past month we've lost an Apache helicopter and the crew on a training exercise and a couple of days ago a couple of F-16s operating out of Suda bay AB had a mid-air during a dogfight exercise, one pilot was killed instantly, one survived and the other succumbed yesterday in the hospital. This is all during peace time and only about the air force. Add to that the maintenance of the border lines that also guard against human trafficking and drug smuggling, a job pretty much exclusively undertaken by conscripts, naval operations and international commitments and it starts taking its toll. We don't have combat troops in Afghanistan and we didn't send any to Iraq (we could get out of that since the NATO charter states that an obligation to send troops arises when an attack against another member has originated from that state...Iraq never attacked a NATO state so we managed to skip that), but we still have engineers and medics in Afghanistan and a couple of frigates on the EU anti-piracy mission off Somalia, expensive missions during a time of intense economic crisis where simple people left and right see their hard-worked-for cash and benefits diminish. If these missions provided something of value for the state, the financial cost would be justified. However, the war in Afghanistan mostly serves to send flocks of immigrants bound for Europe and usually stuck in Greece due to legalities. The Somalia mission holds more favor due the abundance of Greek merchant shipping around the world and its more or less internationally sanctioned nature. This is usually a staple of Greek involvement abroad, the public wants to know what it's for, why it happens and under what legal and moral justification. For example, we had troops in international missions as early as the Korean war, but that was also a UN sanctioned campaign. Same with Kosovo, we didn't participate in the campaign but contributed to the peacekeeping force because it was covered under a UN resolution.

This is all to the knowledge of both the US and the EU, as they are our main weapon suppliers. However, as long as we're left to deal with being the "wave breaker" of Europe without a formal statement of support in the event of conflict or guarantee of sovereignity, we can't really cut down on military spending.