Go to ground.news/Ryan to stay fully informed. Subscribe through my link for 50% the Vantage plan for unlimited access only for the holiday season. This is their biggest sale of the year! Go to www.aeromedlab.com/ if you want to learn more about how we are saving soldiers lives. Watch my "Exposing the Military Industrial Complex" video here: ruclips.net/video/C2gIId1dpDs/видео.html What the Original Johnny Harris video here: ruclips.net/video/iqJ0kg9xvLs/видео.html In this video, I examine journalist Johnny Harris' claims in "Why the U.S. Military Spends So Much Money" and reveal 9 significant inaccuracies or oversights. Many of you asked me to respond, and after reviewing the video, I found substantial misinformation and missing context in Harris's narrative. From misconceptions about the F-35 and defense spending to misleading ideas about consolidation, lobbying, and the "military-industrial complex," Harris paints a one-sided picture without consulting experts with actual military or defense industry experience. All proof can be found for free at RyanMcBeth.Substack.com For uncensored video, check out my substack at: ryanmcbeth.substack.com Like my shirts? Get your own at: www.bunkerbranding.com/pages/ryan-mcbeth Want a personalized greeting: www.cameo.com/ryanmcbeth Watch all of my long form videos: ruclips.net/p/PLt670_P7pOGmLWZG78JlM-rG2ZrpPziOy Twitter: @ryanmcbeth Instagram: @therealryanmcbeth BlueSky @ryanmcbeth Reddit: /r/ryanmcbeth Join the conversation: discord.gg/pKuGDHZHrz Want to send me something? Ryan McBeth Productions LLC 8705 Colesville Rd. Suite 249 Silver Spring, MD 20910 USA
Hi Ryan...I wanted to bring to your attention that Johnny Harris and many others have also lied repeatedly about how many overseas bases the USA has. They claim we have 800 of them, but they hugely padded the number by counting large bases as multiple segments. For instance, Diego Garcia is a single huge base, but Harris et al count it as 12 or 15 different bases just because there are 12 or 15 different administrative segments. They do this with Rammstein, Thule, Guantanamo, and every other US military base...they count the adminstravice sections of every base, instead of counting a whole base as 1 installation. People need to know how they are being lied to.
Hi ikvetch Are they really “lying” as you imply or are they just misinforming? Ryan uses irrelevant metaphors constantly but I don’t see you complaining about that form of misinformation. Just saying if you going to be a useless bægël Ëater at least be consistent.
"The problem with Johnny Harris is that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about until he talks about something you know about”…truer words have never been spoken
This generally applies to all situations where experts in a field know more about a situation than journalists do. On the other hand, generalists such as journalists don't have an axe in the fire, there is no selfish motivation to want one side to prevail. Journalists on the other hand have motivation to make their video more entertaining, which often aims to provoke intense feeling. There's no easier way to do that than to present a one sided argument.
I'm glad someone is calling out Johnny Harris. He used to work for Vox, who make highly polished videos on a variety of subjects. He quit Vox and started his own RUclips channel doing the same thing. He is insufferable. People are lured in by his fancy looking graphics and are tricked into thinking the man knows what he's talking about.
Johnny Harris has gotten the anger of 1) Ukraine War experts. 2) Economists (PhD) 3) Historians. 4) Globalism experts. It's rare for one man to get the anger of so many types of people independently.
@@shadicianBut once your integrity has been questioned on one video, then everything else needs to also be taken into question. Everyone makes mistakes, but the thing is - he almost NEVER acknowledges them, and instead doubles down on his erroneous material. It's been shown for many of his videos that he either has faulty sources, or a severe lack of them in the first place, and he lets his political bias heavily cloud his conclusions. He's really not worth watching
“ It's rare for one man to get the anger of so many types of people independently.” Not when they are all the same entity 🫠. ps you forgot the Military Industrial Complex and Global Media control.
As someone who is on the far left of the political spectrum. I find your videos invaluable to balance my media diet. You haven’t change my views but you have made them much more nuanced. I appreciate you!
Good for you for choosing to diversify your daily content! Keep at it! You'll be shocked in a few years how much you will learn about both sides of the isle. This is just friendly advice, but I would highly advise you to stay away from either the far left or the far right...the answer is always somewhere in the middle. So if someone is on either *far* side of the spectrum, they are severely misinformed through manipulation tactics and sadly...lies. The quicker you realize there's people out there who profit solely off keeping people on the far right and far left, the quicker you will start being able to instantly see through manipulative people that are trying to take advantage of you.
I find him kinda good for a lot of things, after a while you learn to sift away the information that is maybe not exactly as apolitical as it seems but its a good perspective from experience
@@HalfEatenMushroom Well, it depends on whether you are in Europe or the USA... in the States, they have totally absurd ideas about the political spectrum: to give a simple example, Sanders and AOC are considered "socialists", when they are nothing more than left-wing moderates ... to give you another example, I have heard many define KH as a "communist"...🤣 politicians like Harris, in Europe, are considered centrist, and on some ideas she has (regarding international politics) she could also be considered center-right.
@@HalfEatenMushroomyou can test it yourself: ask 10 Americans to define the term "Marxism"; or you can make it even simpler: ask them to define the even more generic term "communism": you will get 10 answers, and most likely all totally different (and above all wrong😆)
Like "Mexico will pay for the wall" "Tariffs are things that other countries pay" "Our economy is in the toilet" "Gangs are taking over apartment buildings, regardless of what the local police say" "Haitians are eating pets" "the Left is making illegal immigrants vote 18 times" etc etc etc. And then you get elected POTUS.
On a recent channel 5 video, which I do like channel 5 btw, someone said that 50 percent of the US budget is going to military and the video made it seem like it was true. I looked it up and it was wrong and it only took a quick Google search, real bruh why can't you check this moment. It's like 13 percent btw.
Listening on this video, I don't see any clear lies, Ryan is more confirming that what Jonny Harris is kind of true. Content angled in different ways but not clear lies. And Ryan is also not objective and this time got more emotional than analytical. Hearing stuff like the military R.D. is as much as the Morocco GDP, sounds lower than I thought. Stuff like that an diaper company have bigger earnings than big weapons company sounds reasonable. I think it's more important that baby buts keeps dry than killing more people. The countries with higher % military budgets is crazy ones with dictators or in war situations, with the exception of Poland that is doing an big spending because of the obvious increased threat levels and the spending is not supposed to be permanent.
On one hand, yes Johnny Harris is pretty bad. On the other Ryan is directly or tangentially connected to denfense industries and intel communities... Not shocked that Harris would be wrong about a lot, also Ryan saying the military industrial complex doesn't exist, is like hearing an Exxon spokesperson deny climate change...
His logic is that the military industrial complex doesnt exist because: A) The top 4 defense contracters generate less revenue than Procter and Gamble... which btw isnt true B) Other industries like Tech (most of the 10 largest corporations on eath), and Oil+Gas (the 2nd largest industry in the World) are bigger
@@user-wy2fu4un8r he always been shady, I think the most shady was the Israel issue and either trying to protray it in a vacuum or tackling lowest hanging fruit, similar to ther agenda drives, like atun shei.
@boredphysicist no, his point is that it doesn't exist as a coherent, powerful group. There use to be a united, powerful lobby referred to as "the military industrial complex" but it's not powerful or united like that anymore. We spent a lot of money on the military when we fought people, and then we spent less money cause we thought we wouldn't have to fight anyone anymore. But now, we may have to fight someone again so we need the money to get ready to fight china. There was corruption and bad stuff before, and there may be again, but if you want a military you need to spend the money.
Military industrial complex is real and to say it’s not real make no sense there are companies that make weapons and to say they control all wars is probably wrong but they likely do have influence in business of war so say it’s not real inaccurate
@@Unknown-r2p2o What is the market cap of Lockheed Martin? Raytheon? Boeing? What's the market cap of Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, and WalMart? War is bad for trade. Military contractors do not have nearly enough money to do what you're suggesting.
You’re guilty of similar lack of context errors. P&Gs largest segment (both gross revenue and profit) was “Fabric and Home Care”, not the segment that includes diapers…which are related to defense spending how? And your comment about how many pages you need to fill out for a grant isn’t evidence against a military industrial complex, if anything it’s evidence for it. Unnecessary complexity favors the status quo. Who can afford to pay experts with experience filling out complicated government forms? Big contractors with experience filling out complicated government forms. Finally, you want to compare spending to GDP but you fail to compare lobbying budget to market capitalization. Okay, Meta’s is 1.4 trillion and Lockheed’s is 127 billion, so to be equivalent Meta should be spending 11x more, which they aren’t. But it’s a 💩 argument either way. Does JH present an unbiased truth? No. Does Ryan McBeth? Also, no. I wish it was otherwise. Fact checking all these so called sources of truth gets really old. Worse, you’re playing the same game he is, while claiming you’re not. 😔
Importantly, it's not. He actually _is_ a journalist. But he's a journalist whose gone rogue, offleash, he's his own editor, and that's bad because there clearly isn't someone to soberly and critically review the work before it goes out. That's why news orgs. the reputable ones, have editorial boards. And That's why it's important to give him shit. He's an actual journalist by training and profession and working background, but now he doesn't have any sort of senior editorial board and his channel needs cash, they're under time pressure to push out content.
@@seacucumberable couldn’t agree more. Like Ryan said about human errors, I don’t think he is pushing lies to intentionally mislead people. I understand it as a lack of peer review and perhaps a problematic environment inside the company.
Procter & Gamble has at least 42 different brands operating under their umbrella globally, the fact that they are extremely profitable does not disprove the military industrial complexes existence.
P&G doesn't "sell diapers," they sell damned near everything. They have a massive fucking product line, from common, every-day items to highly specialized ones. I like your channel, but if you're going to do throw stones, makes sure its not in a glass house.
'if you're going to throw stones, make sure that you don't live on a glass house'. And what he meant is that a single company is bigger than the alleged Military Complex. Also, I do believe that the bigger expense isn't going straight into equipment. But I digress. I rather have facts, than what I want to hear. Ryan does an excellent job at unmasking snake oil sellers, and plain foreing agents born in the very USA.
Its like trying to say big pharma doesnt exist because "The coal industry, who just sell bits of old tree, is larger than the medicine industry" He also argues Military lobbying isnt real just because one of the 4 most valuable companies in the entire world spends more lobbying than one single defense company
I have a Master's Degree in political science, and when I was working on my Ph.D one of my professors proposed to the University to establish a course to educate journalists in political science, since he was baffled about all the miss-information on the news all the time. The program never got off the ground because there was no interest from journalists in actually taking that class.
Former Poli Sci major here turned journalism major! I couldn’t agree more! OMG, the people who covered the election in my college newsroom have ZERO clue how the electoral college even worked. They had no idea what the swing states were nor how the process of our government or other comparative governments work. It’s insane to me. These are the people that we are supposed to “trust” with disseminating information.
Also Poli Sci graduate here. One of my main research topics was the weakness of Polisci when it came to talking to other disciplines, especially technology. It's why I love this channel specifically. A lot of Poli Sci theory pulls from economics but is lacking input from other disciplines. How often have we heard politician trying to explain complex technological concepts or security concerns during a congressional hearing and failing? And I'm not even completely faulting them for it, on the other side, someone in who works in software development might create something unaware of the security, political and normative impact it could unleash, which is exactly what we're seeing with AI and social media. Also it makes me laugh at Ryan tangent about the term global hegemon. That term was beaten into my head from professors with different political beliefs. Someone didn't read Enders Game.
I remember the journalism students in college. That's where you went when virtually every other door, even the "soft sciences," were closed to you. The field is not taken nearly as seriously as its role in democracy demands.
Lol, you were the first person that came to mind, when I saw Johnny's video! And I was waiting for your response (because, what do _I_ know about this stuff??). Boy, did you NOT disappoint!
It's a bit hypocritical to call P&G "a diaper company" with no other context when you spend your entire video blasting Jonny Harris for doing the same thing.
good thing he didn't. there's valid criticism of johnny for this video, but this isn't one of them. he said they're a company that sells diapers. he didn't call them a diaper company.
Johnny Harris - Agenda Contributor The World Economic Forum There i exposed everything he does and stand for. In a two-liner, copied from the official WEF website.
@@shawn576I think it was a year ago or something that a bunch of RUclipsrs jumped on criticizing Johnny Harris in which he actually made some corrections to his videos. I wonder what will happen now
“What did Johnny Harris get wrong in his video” needs to accompany every one of his videos. It’s incredibly generous to call him a journalist, he’s a story-teller.
@@iOSAT storyteller would be neutral. he would lie for personal gain and fame at worst. he is doing active propaganda for an organisation. it's sooo much worse than just telling a lie. it's telling a lie on purpose to misinform you for the gain of others.
@@texasranger24 storyteller noun sto·ry·tell·er ˈstȯr-ē-ˌte-lər : a teller of stories: such as a: a relater of anecdotes b: a reciter of tales (as in a children's library) c: LIAR, FIBBER d: a writer of stories
My mother was a journalist. Months of work, countless hours on the phone, nights and days of intellectual work connecting the dots, meeting with experts, studying some documents to DISCOVER the truth. Johnny is an attractive RUclipsr who loves stories and maps but not discovering the truth, just making it up.
@@tommcfadden5232 I follow his channel and he has made some howlers of errors, I would say his stuff if full of errors that I can see, so how many do I not see since I am not an expert in each field. he is entertaining and interesting enough to make me sometimes go research and find out more, which is not a bad thing. But I would advise anyone to take him with at least a large dose of salt if not several and treat him as an entertainment rather than education. We all have agendas from our personal history and upbringing and to make factual content our logic and reason has to overrule our emotions.
Johnny is piece of work. I stopped taking him seriously after his "North Korea is not a serious threat" video. He is just another mouth on the internet that cherrypicks information that fits his crap narrative about the world.
I mean he's not entirely wrong there, the NK threat is not directly from the state of North Korea but from its much more powerful/capable allies China and Russia. Not even a Nuke from North Korea is a threat to the US, we'd see it launch and shoot it down with the 7 different anti-air/missile platforms we've been designing since the 70s for this exact purpose. But if North Korea invaded South Korea or vice versa, it can spiral out of control extremely quickly and that resulting spiral is where the threat is.
@@TheDreadPirateRoberts-jr2fk ryan is so dumb on this point. makes some vague point about profit and how tech companies make more profit. the name of the game in governmetn contracts is to make costs as high as possible and limit profit (on paper) - this allows you to charge more for contracts. really simple stuff that ryan misses.
Is it a "serious threat"? Is it imaginable that it won't get flattened by South Korea in minutes flat if they were to try to pull some shit? Though i have little doubt that they might try to pull some shit regardless, and that holding them back from doing that is not something one should just stop.
If you think a 40 page grant for $75,000 is bad, wait until you find out that education, arts, and healthcare organizations often have to fill out the same amount or more for only $6,000.
@@christiangrosjean2980 you're going to look really dumb if you went around polling people whether they think $6,000 for a STEM project for students is a better way to spend the governments' money or hundreds of thousands of dollars for research for the Hellfire R-9X, which has only been used effectively on less than 10 people.
@@christiangrosjean2980 agreed. STEM education is far more legitimate that hundreds of thousands of dollars for R&D of a hellfire missile that uses blades, which will be used on less than 20 people.
To be fair, he didn't call P&G "a diaper company". He said that P&G was "a company that sells diapers". He didn't say that P&G sold only diapers or something similar. The idea in this case was to compare the stock prices and he made an example of what was profitable and what not. Just mentioning diapers was a good opposite to "bad greedy defence", demonized by Harris.
@ProPatria1919 its disingenuous. The implication is that they're making more selling diapers than defense contractors. I don't agree with Harris, but why call P&G a company that sells diapers?
Not taking sides in the F-35 controversy, but... The answer to "Did the military-industrial complex trick Poland into buying a fighter that didn't work?" isn't as obvious as you might think. A number of polish procurement decisions had been ostensibly based on hype and/or political calculations, so just because we bought it doesn't mean there's no problems with the thing. It's also worth remembering the F-104 scandal.
One additional reason comparing military spending in US dollars doesn't always make sense is that many countries can buy a lot more for a dollar than we can in the US, known as the price parity index. Something I learned from Perun's videos.
Yeah, it gets really tiring to see people from the West... particularly the US...act like "oh my gosh, it's so cheap to live in such and such country?!?!!???" and not seem to realize that it's cheap for US, but not for THEM because the economy of countries outside of the West (and a handful of the 1st world countries that exist outside of the West) are often vastly lesser with lesser purchasing power and drastically reduced wages of the average populace. So yeah, that $3 lunch you had in Russia doesn't mean that Russia is some amazing utopia where greedy capitalists haven't taken over...when you consider the average Russian only makes on average about $350 a month, that $3 starts looking a LOT more expensive than you would have thought
They don't adjust for that? They should. Like how everyone adjusts for inflation if they're talking about housing in the 40s or the stock market crash of 1929. There's a lot of context missing if you say your grandparents bought their home after the war for $11,000.
@MakerInMotion you *can* adjust for that, or at least do get decently close. The problem is, if you're trying to argue the US is substantially more wasteful in military spending, why would you want to? It can only ever lower any numbers your using for comparison.
What Ryan is not talking about when it comes to congressional members that own stock in defense contractors, is that they selectively enter positions shortly before the company gets a contract and the price goes up. It's not like they bought it 20 years ago and just let it ride...they time the market, because they are writing the policy that will benefit or cripple the market.
The viewer that had the comment "he knows what he's talking about until he talks about what you know about" is so much more correct than they know. My chemistry degree is the main reason I have no faith in basically any media outlet any more. The amount of confident incorrectness by everyone is astonishing.
This is Ryan’s channel when he talks about international relations. Or really anything outside of specific anti-tank platforms. His channel was decent when he only dealt in his area of expertise.
@@theodorekorehonen Ryan’s Project 2025 video. A lot of commenters noted he was just doing a word search and didn’t read the actual texts. He was noticeably more critical about Project 2025’s military policies.
Johnny Harris complaining about the consolidation of the US defense industry to cut DoD costs and using that as an example of why the military spends too much money is... something. Not sure I would call that a good argument though.
Yeah. there are significantly easier arguments to reveal millitary spending waste where contractors kinda scam the government. one example is arbitrary nonsensical limits on repairs that don't improve safety and only serve to profit contractors. the issue is that doesn't fit his narrative and only leads to the military improving it's practices rather than encourage people to be anti-military which is his actual goal.
Your comparison to defense contractors to P&G I think is a prime example of a false equivalency. And playing them down as just a diaper manufacturer is misleading. They make a huge assortment of consumable home goods like toothpaste deodorant, soaps paper towels etc. Things that every single person buys weekly or monthly. And they don't just sell in America. Your comparing that high tech gear sold only to the US government and approved allies. It is a massive false equivalency to try to compare these two industries
As a former defense lobbyist (we like to call it government relations) the truth is somewhere in-between the situations Ryan and Johnny present. Like all complex things, they are more grey than black or white.
Ryan is full of s*** Comparing with diaper companies is stupid There's only a couple companies and they have a Monopoly on the market So yeah diaper companies make a fortune make a fortune and these politicians they know when to invest in these military tech companies. When to get in once I get out and make a fortune just more cherry picking from Ryan Macbeth and I am very pro-military but I smell this guy's BS a mile away he's a profiteer of War if soldiers don't bleed he doesn't make any money
@@romanstingler435 I can give you one example from current events although I'm not a former lobbyist... I don't have the time to give a list of citations so you'll have to fact check... Some politically and financially motivated pundits and politicians have created a narrative that Chinese consumer and enterprise drones are a threatto US national security. Why would they do that? There's been no substantiating evidence presented and to the contrary there have been several independent audits that show no threat. As far as I can tell the narrative started from so-called experts trying to make a name for themselves. Over in the last 10 years a few American companies tried to produce drones and they were total failures as drones and as companies. During that time some MIT students created a company called Skydio which dabbled in this and that, mainly focused on trying to come up with a drone for deliveries. Then they decided to take a shot where all the others had failed and released a consumer drone in 2018. It totally failed. Skydio realized that the consumer market was too hard so they shifted to enterprise first responder and military markets. They struggled there as well and while they have now finally come out with a drone that somewhat usable it's still half as capable as the Chinese equivalent and cost 5 times more. So about to fail again Skydio decided to get political and have the competition banned from the US market. Recently Skydio has been spending tons of money to sway politicians like Stephanik and Texter, to perpetuate the false narrative of a national security threat and to higher people with ties to politicians. Skydio can't produce drones that compete with DJI so they're trying to have DJI banned. Not just from the military market, they also want it banned from consumers, hobbyist and small businesses. Skydio has one drone model that is not suitable for 99% of the American market. They're not trying to build in American drone industry they're trying to destroy it, making themselves the only option. Some corrupt American politicians are happy to take the money. If you want more specific information leave a comment and I can try to come up with a reading list for you. There's a channel called steel city drones that has been covering the latest attempts to get Skydio banned through the NDAA and other legislation. DJI imports are currently being held at customs because because somebody in the government alleges that they used slave labor to produce the drones. Our government doesn't have a problem with Chinese labor for hundreds of billions of dollars of products, but 10 million worth of drones is all a sudden a problem?
The Stinger missile segment is a good analogy to why the SR-71 Blackbird wasn't brought back from retirement when the GWOT kicked off. You can't just fire up a shut down assembly line from the 1960's to make specialty parts, and even if you could, the costs would be extremely prohibitive.
its a good example of what most people don't understand on these government budgets, sometimes cutting to 'save' ends up costing way more later on. some things will be lost forever.
It’s called obsolescence, we run into it so much because Uncle Sam doesn’t want to buy more or think they can save. Then they blow millions just to find a replacement part because they didn’t buy enough or ignored a recommendation for last time buy. It’s not even the people in the defenses fault many times when their budget is leveraged a million ways,and the funds have been allocated and it takes a helluva lot of work to get funds reallocated or find more funds to plus up the effort. Many times it’s rob peter to pay Paul. Or decide to just ignore Paul all together and decide to only feed Paul because someone somewhere felt that was the most cost effective thing, or pure personnel opinion and self interest. People seem to forget politicians do call the shots on certain discretionary spending based on information or real world situation and geopolitics. It no lie to say congress decided that or the senate defense oversight committee. Big budget programs live or die at the capitol building.
@@egondro9157 this isn't just a government problem, my dad did procurement for a major O&G company. On projects he often bought an extra container of parts, bolts, spares, etc. The reason, the project was $200 million, spending $40k on spares was a rounding error and when a certified bold is missing and holds up a whole crew for two days while DHL is overnighting the part from halfway around the world at an ungodly cost, having the parts you need is key. The contractors in the millitary love change, change is money, change is profits.
This guy claiming the Military Industrial Complex doesn't exist because the key defense contracts don't make much profit. LOL That's not a bug, that's a feature my man. The company looks like it's not super profitable so us tax payers don't feel ripped off. But given that they markup the crap out of their own expenses, very little auditing and oversight exists, and the CEOs and other company leaders rake in dozens of millions in salaries and bonuses, so yeah on paper it doesn't look like they made profit but trust me, everyone up the chain is well fed.
So I'm a mostly left-leaning person, with a right-leaning view when it comes to cops and military. I saw the Johnny Harris video, and I was shaking my head. I have my own personal gripes about the right AND the left. I think everyone should call out their own side when they do something wrong. That's integrity. Johnny Harris, is in my opinion just as bad as someone like Tucker Carlson. They lie to your face about things and also don't take a moment to understand to other side of the political aisle. They don't talk to the other side, instead opting to only talk within their circle. This is the issue I have with both sides of the political spectrum. Just too extreme and non-factual, and unwilling to listen to dissenting opinions, and Johnny Harris is a contributor to that.
Thinking for yourself is not what you’re supposed to be doing dummy. Why aren’t you thinking exactly what you’re supposed to? Hate the “other” because that’s what I’m telling you to do. Why don’t you trust me blindly?
Your “mostly left leaning but right leaning on cops and military. Maybe you are describing yourself as antifa? You should both incoherent and inconsistent
Your “mostly left leaning but right leaning on cops and military. Maybe you are describing yourself as antifa? You should both incoherent and inconsistent
This stuff is all about clicks, engagement and money. Truth rarely factors in. Its all about telling people what they want to hear, doesn't matter if its true or not. Sometimes you see someone like Johnny starting out kind of neutral politically, because they're testing out the audience and seeing where the easiest route to cash exists. Then once they fund that target audience, that is who they focus on, truth be damned. Ryan seems to be about as straight a shooter as it gets. He's in this for the right reasons.
"US spends too much on military" >US 3,5% GDP >Poland 5% GDP And if anything, Poland is the only sane NATO member right now. So you better double those F-35 acquisitions, dear americans, those are some rookie numbers right now 😅
Poland never ever did spend 5% of GDP. Not even close. And let's not forget that Poland didn't even spend 2% before 2022/23, despite their geographical location. So, there obviously is some catching up to do for them.
Prior to 2022, Poland’s military spending was consistently around 2% of GDP, aligning with NATO guidelines. This reflected its strategic focus on regional security, particularly in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014.
I'm a big fan, Ryan, but you haven't done much to dispel myths on costs. 1. Based on GAO, F35 still has very high maintainence costs. Half of the planes aren't operational. If capability was the only criteria to keep planes going, we would still have the Concorde. Everyone would be owning a Maserati or a Range rover :) 2 Israel references for F35! The US Foreign military financing funds these Israeli F35 aircrafts. Taxpayers pay that. And need that tech to fight...who again? Iran? 3. Politicians "investing" in defense contractor stocks over time is not the issue. The issue is when politicians are "trading" for quick gains. Day trading is not prohibited. Look up how many representatives frequently trade. 4. Transperency is still severely lacking. Ok. Older systems need to be fabricated n programmers, testers, operators rehired. Still need to provide the cost and how they reworking it now. Are they making them more modular now? Is stinger which is made by one company, the sole choice? 5. Defense contractors wouldn't be making political contributions and lobbying if it wasn't profitable. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. Not some dude you going after !! Eisenhower warned us about runaway defense spending. One of the reasons Soviet union collapsed was this heavy spending on military! F35 allied dots are good for showing on the map. but Canada, Korea, Australia raised concerns on maintainence costs, design flaws.
День назад+12
Thank you. Came here for this. I love to see things challenged, but he makes no real case for any of his responses. More clickbait than anything…
example of what? is harris lying when he says we spend the GDP of entire nations on aspects of the military? we spend more in dollar amount than the next 5 biggest nation's budgets combined. lol
@@snowballeffect7812 I'm talking about their military budget and you can't easily calculate their GDP either. The GDP is calculated using number that the nation themself reports. China being an authoritarian country with little in the way of transparency or internal checks/balances has and does fudge their numbers considerably.
A huge reason for why comparison to most other countries are not fair and why we should look at spending as a percentage of GDP is just wages. Like for the Morocco example a US soldier seems to make about 10-20 times as much money as a Moroccan soldier, so it's no surprise that the US will spent way way more money. The US government has to compete on the American labor market where soldiers could get high wages working a 9-5 job, so they have to pay a lot of money. Add to that the the US is a much bigger country engaged in global conflicts and not just in conquering a piece of dessert and US military spending suddenly dose not seem so unreasonable at all.
the whole point is that the more units you buy the cheaper the price. Getting everyone to buy F-35s has made it an affordable stealth combat aircraft. The biggest problem within the military industrial complex is the desire for proprietary systems. If European navys standardized on a single ASW patrol Frigate, a single Air Defense Destroyer and a single Corvette type and then bought them in bulk the cost of the ships would shrink while the potential for improvements would go up.
@@MrChickennugget360 The problem with getting different countries to standardize on a single design is that each country has different requirements. Thats why international partnerships to develop things like fighters and tanks typically don't work out.
Maybe for some countries on their orders, but ours are definitely more than $75 million. When I was at Edwards during the X phase of the development, they were supposed to be far less than they ended up being. It was a hard plane to make work with the technology at the time, and a lot of work went into redoing the plane as technology rapidly progressed. Ultimately we could have had better aircraft for specialized purposes if we didn’t have to make it replace multiple airframes, but because of government bureaucracy we had to do it and ended up wasting more money and making an airframe that’s not great at everything it’s replacing. Everyone tries to profit off our needs in the military and it ends up hurting the end user and taxpayers. It really pisses me off how both political sides spend their time slinging mud at each other and both getting parts of it wrong. It’s possible we don’t need to spend as much to get more and we must have a strong military. It’s very important to be critical of government spending. Just like we spend more money on healthcare than anyone else, yet often times it’s a pretty mediocre experience. It’s nothing to be proud of spending more than anyone else on things, and not getting our money’s worth out of it. There are A LOT of people making more than they should off taxpayers.
Ryan dropping the line "And of course I can find his personal email and number because... y'know *shows a video of a MQ drone launching a hellfire missile* I'm Ryan" Is such a badass line that only someone like Ryan can use
I don't feel any strong affinity towards either of y'alls content, but I think that its interesting that you call out the "apples to oranges" comparison of comparing defense spending to a national GDP, but you use that same apples to oranges comparison style when comparing the size of P&G to large military contractors. I don't think you can in good faith compare the two without also recognizing you're creating a false equivalence. To put it in your own words: The top 5 defense contractors aren't P&G, bub. We're not the same size, we don't have the same customers, and we don't have the same competitors as P&G. It makes me question how much of the things you say are also the silver tongue of a snake oil salesman...
He'll probably show up here and thank you for the critique and point out how he tries to keep his videos running time in check and has to sacrifice things like context to do that. He does that a lot.
I served from 1980 to 1999, U.S. Army Reserves. I was a medic. My unit slowly diminshed to nothing and the GOA had calculated that too many Reservists were going to collect pensions. They ratcheted up the PT standards, seniority points systems, height weight profiling and performance reviews until they had gotten rid of many units and enough people who wouldn't get pensions. "Thank you for your service." often doesn't cut it when I realize I will not be getting a pension, that I wasn't allowed to get back in after 9/11, and many of the benefits I wouldn't have collected until I was 65 are now closed to me. People like Johnny Harris make me sick. Both the military and people like Harris fail to remember what is often attributed to Orwell: "You sleep safely at night because rough men with guns stand ready to do violence upon those who would disturb your slumber." I hope Mr. Harris sleeps well.
Reading your story almost brought tears to my eyes.. We ALL owe you and people like Ryan and yourself a giant thank you! I pay my taxes in hope that some part of it would go towards helping you to live decent life after the sacrifices you’ve made. This Johnny guy is a dishonest sleaze ball. Sincerely, Thank you for your service from the bottom of my LEGAL immigrant’s heart!
@@thelordofnuggets629 Whether they do or don't doesn't matter. I was there to do my duty. The difference between a civilian and a citizen is that a citizen makes it their personal responsibility to protect their people. It isn't just a Robert Heinlein quote. Its a lifestyle. That said. I did my job. That's what counts.
@@aljohnson3717 America enjoys its freedom, and they get to do so on the cheap. The amount of money spent on defense, while commendable compared to other nations who are closer to the threat than we are here, is the small price we pay because our enemy isn't within artillery range. I worry more about the vets coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who struggle with all of the mental anguish and the lack of response from the military and the VA. We lose more soldiers to suicide than we did to twenty years of war. There needs to be a much more concerted effort in the mental healthcare field for these guys. I have what I need to get by in life, but I don't know how to translate that for others. I had help. Many are less fortunate. Help them. And.... You're welcome. Glad to do my part.
The problem with a lot of RUclips "journalists" is that they got their credibility from basically being a travel blogger and people somehow morphed that into "this guy knows what he is talking about."
I had to laugh during the F-35 section. If you compare the F-35 to almost any aircraft the military has fielded since before WW2 you'd find that it has one of the best records out there. Hell, more than a few of the airframes developed during WW2 had a 50% or worse safety record and an operational record that wasn't much better. And just so we're clear, when I say safety record, I'm talking about crashes and deaths not in combat.
He continuasly makes slight mocking remarks and refers to his profession, but yet he doesn't know basic terminology from IR? Is this an American issue where the perception of American military might is not accurately represented or taught or pure ignorance from his perspective. Anyways had me shocked as well lmao
I believe this is more of a vibe situation. We are always told we can't afford better health care and schools, but there is always money to increase the military budget. There is always billions to send to other counties, but we can't afford to increase SNAP benefits. This leads to the big number bad feeling. I always appreciate your reporting Ryan. There defiantly needs to be more military reporters on the online news networks.
The F-35 is a target because all cutting edge military technology looks like a haphazard mess if you look at it over it’s development period. Most of the time these developments start with requirements that are vague or impossible. Then as time goes on and what can be executed is narrowed down the roles and capabilities are refined. Then as other nations react and technology changes the requirements also change. Each of these stages rehash the project over and over again. When you’re building something that no one has ever done before, with capabilities that no one ever imagined, and completion that no one could quantify it’s bound to seem like an utter waste. Now wait 30-60 years and all of a sudden we’ll forget all that and say how well it’s served its role and how it’s a shame we need to replace it. Look back at the F-15, B-52, A-10 and people called those projects a disaster at the time. Now we call them some of the finest aircraft produced. In fact he F-15 (correction F-14) was labeled as bloated and a waste until all of a sudden this movie called “Top Gun” came out and then everyone said it was amazing and iconic.
It’s hilarious how people keep trying to dunk on the F-35, the latest Sandbox News video points this out, and makes the point how the F-35 literally has a better accident rate than the F-16 does, and its availability rate isn’t much worse, and is mostly related to software upgrades. It’s bonkers that people still keep complaining about it as some shining example of corruption or US incompetence or something.
@@phishphood423now yep there is corruption. It exists in government and non-government. There is waste, fraud, abuse, etc. there is also a lot of politics in government (go figure). There is a lot of politics in large businesses too. I’ve been an insider, a contractor, a consultant, in the fully public sector, private sector, startup and global multinational. The game changes but a lot of it is the same. There are time when the rules are followed, times when they are not. Sometimes that works out well, sometimes not. But almost every example I’ve seen it’s always a lot of people working with what they got and trying. Which is more than what happens in a lot of other places where corruption is just the way 75% of the time.
It’s hilarious how people keep trying to dunk on the F-35, the latest Sandbox News video points this out, and makes the point how the F-35 literally has a better accident rate than the F-16 does, and its availability rate isn’t much worse, and is mostly related to software upgrades. It’s bonkers that people still keep complaining about it as some shining example of corruption or US incompetence or something.
The problem with politicians investing in the defense stocks is that they know when to buy right before a large contract and the stock jumps up. They often day trade defense contractors with insider knowledge. You only spoke about long term investments with defense contractors which is a totally different thing.
I don't think it's entirely his fault if he's like that, he grew up in a mormon family so lies always been around him since he was a baby. In this community they basically don't have too much choice but to lie regularly or they'll quickly get in trouble. (BTW I know it because he made a video about this. I mean about being a Mormon, not about being a liar... lol)
@@texasranger24 Exactly, he’s literally a talking head for the globalist agenda and just regurgitates their accepted opinions and views. And all videos come back to way they want
I work for pratt and whitney, we don't make any money on selling engines, we make money on parts and service.. that is 100% across the board, from commercial to military engines.
70% on average of any military major acquisition is lifecycle sustainment costs, not the actual purchase. Think about the parts and maintenance it takes on a new car over its lifetime.
@EverettBurger when car dealerships tack on a "adjustment fee" for market price, thats theft. We literally agree on a dollar per a unit and if it costs more we eat it, if it costs less, we have to disclose that and lose that profit.. its part of the procurement transparency and regulations.
This is the sticky market when you are the only vendor with a qualified replacement part. The part is priced on how expensive it is to get the plane back in the air not what it costs to make it.
Military equipment is expensive. It always has been. In the mid 1930s UK tried to re-arm on the cheap. WW1 artillery was dusted off and tarted up. Then they got their a*ses kicked in France & Belgium. The men were extracted at Dunkirk but the equipment got left behind. UK had to rapidly build new gun systems and tanks. USA provided most of the vehicles at very reasonable prices. UK made the final debt payment in the 1990s.
I will never understand why people feel the need to lie about the US. There is enough factual stuff to criticize without having to lie about it. It must be exhausting.
Agree. I'm sure there is plenty wrong with military procurement and overall defense policy but a fair look would compare it with other government activities and other countries. Even asking what the quantum is would need comparison with others. Harris says USA outspend all other countries ignoring that list includes China Russia Iran north Korea who have all made public statements threatening the USA and the USA might have to fight all four at once...hence the need to outspend them
Because coming to a more nuanced perspective takes a whole lot of effort. At least when compared to rattling off intellectually dishonest talking points which you know 99% of your audience won't bother to fact check because they already want to believe in a certain conclusion.
Ukraine gets weapons Bit then the us makes more of the same or most likely better weapons to keep their stocks from going down And becose of scale they become cheaper
yeah, see the Stinger Missile example; not doing so would cost more. US dumps it's old(er) stock into Ukraine and the 'funding' price-tag could either be the cost of that stock, or the cost of it's replacements (although people rarely clarify). US wins by not having to scrap out-dated or expired equipment; Ukraine wins by being able to use them; the (non-existent) Industrial Military Complex wins by retain jobs and institutional knowledge
The point about tech stocks being more profitable than military stocks is awful. Johnny Harris didn't say that military stocks are the most profitable. He said that it's bad that the people in charge of deciding funding for these companies personally make more money when they give these companies more. People in the government shouldn't have monetary incentives that align with companies that are entirely propped up by government spending.
Johnny Harris has always been a fishy guy. Heard a lot about him getting information wrong on his videos so that’s why I don’t watch him. Glad you made a video on this guy.
This is the 3rd video where he says he's going to disprove "lies".... When in reality, he just disagrees with the importance of data. Theres a difference between a "lie" and "disagreement". Ryan is just a troll.
I worked putting together and running what were probably the first autonomous vehicles, US army tanks, as target vehicles for weapons testing for the US military back in 1979. I drove tanks with no brakes. I climbed into a burning tank to shut off the engines. I chased on foot a runaway tank with a berserk computer, in total darkness in a snowstorm at Ft. Riley, KS. I had a secret clearance and I was paid $7.50 an hour, an average tech wage in the town I worked at the time. I've worked at other Mil contracting jobs. They paid me the going tech rate. What costs so much for military stuff wasn't my pay. It is ensuring that military gear works under all conditions, hot, cold, wet dry, day, night, in dust, in snow, after it's been dropped, after it's been run over, under every scenario. I saw certification paperwork verifying a 24 hour burn-in of each individual 5 cent resistors for a flight circuit bd for a spy satellite. The testing costs far more than the resistors. But it's necessary. You don't replace a resistor in a spy satellite in orbit. The costs of military supplies is what it is because it needs to be. Having said that, I'm very much in favor of close supervision of every military contract. It's a whole lot of money, and wherever there is a whole lot of money there are always a whole lot of people looking to get some for themselves. BTW, Project 2025 is not something that reasonable Americans want, but it IS what they have voted for, so they will get it. They voted for donald trump, and what happens from now on isn't what they will want, but what they voted for. Yes, people can vote to be self-destructive, and so they did. It's a Darwin Award kinda thing.
My understanding is that Project 2025 did not come from Trump, it came from a think tank with no affiliation with Trump. He may well do some of it, but it is not his baby.
"But you voted for it" is such a cop out. You had a binary choice, and one of the choices wasn't even elected by the party members, they were anointed. And here you are blaming the people for voting between two terrible options. Sure buddy.
Insider trading is a huge issue which exists outside of defense contractors. However, saying that it isn't an issue for defense contractors, because defense contracts are not profitable is incorrect because the officials can profit off of micro-trends which they have control of and than sell.
True, but the point still stands. If you’re an investor, military investment is not a good way optimize your returns. That said, I don’t think Ryan’s point was a clear rebuttal of Harris’s insinuation of greed on the part of defense personnel. I mean, they could just be incompetent or lazy at investing.
Yeah that felt like such a weird point to emphasize, like yeah it is a decent comparison but P&G has its hands in so many consumer products more than diapers
Johnny Harris is a character who only sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and he usually talks plain nonsense. He is trying to be Veritasium without investigative journalism, that is, his sources are "reddit, I told you so bro, trust me" and the big media like buzufeed articles 😅
I'm not a fan of Johnny Harris. He makes content that is made to be easy to digest and as a consequence- a ton gets missed. BUT... You were clearly triggered hard by his video. its obvious you approached his video the same way he approach his video; you had a point of view to advance with a hardened conclusion, and you filled in the blanks to advance that conclusion. You entirely missed the point of many of Harris' arguments. For example- he wasn't comparing the USA to Morocco. He was using that figure to give an idea of scale... You go on to explain why the "revolving door" exists. Yes- no shit- this info is not in dispute. Again you entirely missed the point. The issue is not why the system operates this way- but the very fact that it operates this way. And dude- we get it, you were this and that and you studied this and that and bla bla bla. We don't need to hear about it several times a video. Or I guess you feel like we do...?
The fact that the five major defense contractors make less than proctor and gamble does not mean there isn’t a military industrial complex. The two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Talk about the MIC makes it look like something overwhelming, overpowering, that effectively runs the US from the shadows. Showing that it's smaller than P&G puts that into perspective and makes it clear, that it doesn't.
@@kaszaspeter77 It’s comparing apples to oranges. P&G doesn’t rely on government contracts (taxpayer dollars) to remain in business. The MIC does. You’re point, however, is a valid one. The term, “Military Industrial Complex”, is used pejoratively. This may very well bias one’s arguments and analysis from the start.
@@kaszaspeter77 P&G's market cap is 400 billion dollars. lockhead's is like 125 billion. P&G is a gigantic multinational corporation. 74% of lockheed's net sales are accounted for by the US government lol. 60%+ is from DOJ alone. The MIC is real and alive. There's no reason that stinger missile is marked up that high but for the fact that the military needs it that badly and was willing to pay that amount. any capitalist would do the same thing in their position lol.
Thanks Ryan, Johnny Harris’ videos are entertaining and engaging. Like many pundits I also enjoy them until they talk about something I have expertise in. Thanks for the straight talk.
Meta spends more on lobbying. Okay? So? Who cares? This is whataboutism. That Meta also lobbies does not offset the fact that there is lobbying done by defense contractors. Johnny Harris rightfully raises those issues as a concern and you essentially just confirms that it happens but says it's not a big deal because others lobby and lobby more. Set aside the fact that there is a difference with a defense contractor lobbying and a tech company, it is still bad for democracy no matter who does it. A more mature response would be to acknowledge that while not exclusive to defense contractors (which never was the claim btw) that lobbying is bad no matter who does it. That Lockheed does it is not something we should celebrate or divert away from as a non-issue. There's other stuff like this in your video, but this one stuck out to me personally. Just because the intentions behind a critique like this may seem anti-American or whatever doesn't mean we have to run in the complete opposite direction. We can chew and walk at the same time, which means to be pro-democracy and to also critique ourselves if necessary. This is not an authoritarian country. - Also the drone joke is in very poor taste. Even if they had a 100% hit rate without any innocent casualties which we know they unfortunately don't it would be wrong to make a joke like that. Yes, you can blame the terrorists if you want, but it still would trigger someone who has had a close family member accidentally die to something like that. I disliked your video over this, please think more about those you unintentionally can harm with such jokes. We can do better in communicating over this issue and we are not endearing those angry at America's foreign policy by making snarky jokes about drones. EDIT: I will still say that I like your coverage usually and that I dislike Johnny Harris on a lot of his takes, sorry if I came off a bit negative here. That was not the intention.
I never heard of Johnny Harris and thought about skipping this because it's half an hour. Now I wish you'd do the whole 90 minutes. Great fact-filled commentary, thank you.
IMO Johnny Harris's videos are all this poorly researched and oriented around proving a specific political point for which he cherry picks info, talks to one or two biased parties, and then fills air with speculative commentary. He often preferences facts/statements that superficially 'blow your mind' but are generally not very insightful or informed. Like I just watched the first half of one of his videos where he REPEATEDLY emphasized that countries and their governments... ARE MADE UP by humans. It turns out things like President and lines on maps don't occur naturally without humans making them. MIND BLOWN.
I’m a researcher and historian with published work and time in the Senate. I respect what you do and I like your style, McBeth. That’s why I’m going to support what you do.
Only enemies of the US want our military defunded. However the way military budgets are done does need to be modernized. We shouldn't punish divisions and units for not spending all of their budget each year.
I worked in the aerospace and defense industry for over 35 years. These people are always blaming the defense companies for their high prices, $10,000 hammer, $100k toilet etc etc. But try getting a specification for building some widget from the government and you will see really quickly why it costs so much. We built components for satellites and often the paperwork required to be sent with the component weighed much more than the component itself. There are so many requirements for material certifications, quality assurance, supply chain restrictions and so on that you usually had to have a dedicated staff to just verify we were compliant with the specification.
So in other words, The paper trail, red tape, and other CHOICES the government made caused us to send orders of magnitude more money to build defense implements than they actually cost
Agreed. The first company I worked for would not do government work for this reason, and because the requirements put on the entire company for extra auditing, etc. This was a fully American owned private company, it just wasn't worth the effort. We were one of only two globally significant suppliers of our equipment, and engineering companies knew they would have to trick us to get a proposal for the equipment so they could fulfill their requirements to go out to multiple qualified bidders on the RFQ. They knew we wouldn't accept the order and they weren't going to write one to us, they'd find some reason to make sure we weren't going to win, even if we were low bid. I'd give the purchasers some grief and there were ways it could be made up later. All the little details of commercial enterprise in America, not good or bad, just part of it.
I am working in industry that make just small component for aerospace and military. Let me say, forget the burocracy. They are cases where you testing $2 components for month that cost tent of thousand of dollars to be sure that component will not fail iin critical application. If you sending space mission to mars that will cost hundreds of million of dollars you can not just send mechanic because some $2 components brake down. That just not possible. You just need to make that component extremely reliable and you do that by developing new processes and method the you used in many other products. One of the biggest open secret of US defense industry is that the money that it spend to that main contractors really go to thousands of subcontractors for R&D for development new components and processes as well manufacturing methods, and they are used in vast majority of product that we buying every day - look on you cell phone components. For hum the original research was done?
Really? Please defend the Boeing soap dispensers. Please explain the 2024 Pentagon audit that determined prices were inflated. This is not hyperbole, but fact. And there are a ton of examples.
@@JPage-fj7mb These people will just ignore record profits and bonuses given out to executives by defence contractors. Yes it is more expensive to meet government specifications, but that is a minimal part of the costs here.
“Let me start this video by describing how my entire career would sway me to be biased against the entire idea of defunding the military” the problem with this entire video is you operate with the fundamental belief that America “needs” to constantly grow its military
On the military industrial complex: the issue isn’t how big a company or its revenue is. The issue is how much it spends on lobbying and how well positioned it is to wield influence. These are all different issues.
Have you seen his video on nationalism? Claiming only 2.5% of Italians spoke Italian in 1950? What's with all the Italian speaking Italian Americans, then? It took me 3 videos to figure out that he is a moron.
Most Italians didn't speak Italian, but another language such as Piedmontese, Furlan, Veneto, Sardu, and of course what most Italian Americans spoke, Sicilianu or Calabrese. Some would call them dialects, but that would be incorrect. They are Italian languages, but not (Standard) Italian or dialects thereof.
Whatever the reason for consolidation, consolidation still happened, and it's still a source of market manipulation and risk for the US military. You have a few points, but ignore the argument too many times to be considered an impartial commenter. For example, you ignore the dividends that politicians get from military contractors. Boeing, for example, has reoriented their entire operations towards the production of dividends, leading to poor quality. There is a huge problem with US military spending money in unproductive ways (i.e. funneling money in the form of stocks and dividends to shareholders) rather than actually producing equipment and services for the defense of the nation.
The worst part is that in the past when he has been called out like this, he has responded positively, pledging to do better. Yet every new video is the same level of very basic surface level knowledge and common misconception.
You can buy lots of different 8-bit chips. There's the NXP (formerly Motorola) HCS08, 8051-compatibles from dozens of different vendors, Microchip PIC and AVR, ST8, Zilog Z8, etc.
@@bocadelcieloplaya3852 i like to think op was being sarcastic. that missile manufacturer is absolutely fleecing the taxpayers, and I would do the exact same thing if I were in their position lol. idk why ryan doesn't understand how capitalism works lol. also emulators are pretty easy. there are plenty of videos online, documents, etc. you can even just directly play a lot of games in the web browser. i was playing banjo-kazooie in chrome the other day lol.
What you have here sounds right and checks out given the numbers you cited, but the phrasing used in saying that the top five Defense Companies make less than Proctor and Gamble sound like they are combined less. They are individually less of course, but saying that way seems to imply that there is some collective value in saying anything about the group beyond just that the top one is still smaller. Or did I just misunderstand this?
@@uku4171 the fact that you were criticized for questioning how this 30 minute video is 90 minutes long to Harris’ 28 minute video is an important reminder of why you can never have a debate on the internet in good faith when people are busy changing basic facts like how long a video is. You can inform people about how and why military spending is done but you can’t ever win in a comment thread occupied by people looking for ways to call you a liar for wondering how 30 minutes is 90 minutes in some sort of silly 1984 scenario.
the stinger costing 10x more bc we gave all them all away is not a good defense of the industrial complex lmfao. his point still stands they are wasting money....
I stop when you said the Military Industrial Complex doesn't exist. I was in the airforce, I know it exist, in almost every country too. just because the company don't make bomb of money, doesn't mean that money is put in an incinerator and burned. people get paid, and you can see the number of ex-military that are working in these companies. of course they will pad their own future with those companies. just providing food for soldier, you have any idea how much money and job there are in it?
unfortunately for you, the majority of the net profits from those contracts actually goes to the board and c-level executives. most employees are paid pretty poorly compared to industry standard for things like software engineering, manufacturing and technical drawing.
1991 stinger: $25,000 2024 Price adjusted for inflation: $58,000 Current price of stinger: 200k Yeh it’s not the same guts but how tf is it 4x more expensive
It’s what happens when the infrastructure (and economy of scale) for a product essentially disappears. I recommend watching Perun’s videos on military procurement to learn more about it. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re selling it for a little bit extra.
It's old technology. You redevelop the missile with the parts that are available. Fit, form, and function is never the same. But to make the same missile, it has to be. 🤷♂️
It's because it wasn't a lie. Johnny is right lol. why would they NOT overcharge if the military needs them that badly? lol. i bet these guys are all up capitalism's ass, but man do they not get how any of it works lmao.
why would they need to spend that much if they are the same people and are likely providing insider trading info? lol. if johnny doesn't know how military contracting works, this guy REALLY doesn't know how it works nor how lobbying works lol.
So funny - he cries about JH's comparison between US military R&D and Morocco's GDP. And then makes a similar comparison between P&G (calls them only a diaper company lol) and the Congo's GDP. I thought he was against comparing countries with institutions lol.
You can't deny that the defense industry has its fair share of corruption. You need to fight against that. There's no way around it. And you can't deny that the US spends what some would argue is an unreasonable amount of money on defense. However, the defense industry as a whole can never be as efficient and cheap as other private sectors. It literally can't happen. It's one of those sectors that is indispensable for a country's existence. That means you can't afford your defense contractors to be uncompetitive. That means you have to prop them up, even when doing so doesn't make much sense in a business or efficient spending sense, because you can't afford them to go out of business. That means paying a lot of money for things that don't necessarily deserve their price tag. Add in a mountain of bureaucracy and opaqueness that is required due to the nature of the business, and you've got the perfect recipe for things costing too much and a lot of room for corruption to roam free.
@@soccerguy2433 he did lol. the revolving door is real and obvious. it's why their lobbying amount is so low; they can just buy stock right before a conflict. that stinger missile's price is also not accounted for by resurrecting manufacturing of its parts. it's like dozens of times more expensive than it would be. if the military needs them that badly, the contractor would be morons to not fleece them for it lol. it's just basic (crony) capitalism.
@@snowballeffect7812 It really isn't. Exceptions do not disprove the rule. That's why capitalism (within reasonable limits) works in the long run and state controlled economies don't.
The logic behind using GDP as a metric for determining how much should be spent is a red herring. It's like comparing the spending between the US and Somalia on military spending even if Somalia spent 100% of their GDP on military it would be insignificant in comparison to the US. The fact that the US spends more than all of our competition combined despite not having anywhere near the population as those combined countries. A better metric would be how much do we spend per person on defense. That is if you believe that it truly about defense spending and not about global influence.
Thank you for putting this video together. It provides much-needed context on these topics and has significantly impacted my trust in Johnny Harris. I do have a couple of comments: 1) I find the comparison of dollar amounts to Morocco's GDP unhelpful-it feels sensationalist and lacks context-but it isn’t technically a lie. 2) You rightly examine military spending as a percentage of GDP, but I think you missed an important point: compared to other advanced economies not engaged in active wars, the U.S. spends about 1.5x. The UK and France are the most relevant comparisons here. U.S. military spending is naturally higher because, unlike most countries, it supports a global military presence to defend allies and project power-an inherently costly endeavor. Thanks again!
yes, we need to unionize, esp those MIC contractors' employees. they get paid 50% industry standard cuz they're based in Alabama and such. quite a ripoff.
Now just wait a sec. Not saying you’re lying out your arse, but saying that Proctor & Gamble is a company that makes diapers is as bad of a lie of omission as Johnny Harris. They have like 30+ brands that make a lot more than diapers.
Go to ground.news/Ryan to stay fully informed. Subscribe through my link for 50% the Vantage plan for unlimited access only for the holiday season. This is their biggest sale of the year!
Go to www.aeromedlab.com/ if you want to learn more about how we are saving soldiers lives.
Watch my "Exposing the Military Industrial Complex" video here:
ruclips.net/video/C2gIId1dpDs/видео.html
What the Original Johnny Harris video here:
ruclips.net/video/iqJ0kg9xvLs/видео.html
In this video, I examine journalist Johnny Harris' claims in "Why the U.S. Military Spends So Much Money" and reveal 9 significant inaccuracies or oversights. Many of you asked me to respond, and after reviewing the video, I found substantial misinformation and missing context in Harris's narrative. From misconceptions about the F-35 and defense spending to misleading ideas about consolidation, lobbying, and the "military-industrial complex," Harris paints a one-sided picture without consulting experts with actual military or defense industry experience.
All proof can be found for free at RyanMcBeth.Substack.com
For uncensored video, check out my substack at:
ryanmcbeth.substack.com
Like my shirts? Get your own at:
www.bunkerbranding.com/pages/ryan-mcbeth
Want a personalized greeting:
www.cameo.com/ryanmcbeth
Watch all of my long form videos:
ruclips.net/p/PLt670_P7pOGmLWZG78JlM-rG2ZrpPziOy
Twitter:
@ryanmcbeth
Instagram:
@therealryanmcbeth
BlueSky
@ryanmcbeth
Reddit:
/r/ryanmcbeth
Join the conversation:
discord.gg/pKuGDHZHrz
Want to send me something?
Ryan McBeth Productions LLC
8705 Colesville Rd.
Suite 249
Silver Spring, MD 20910
USA
He is kind of famous with his spins
Hi Ryan...I wanted to bring to your attention that Johnny Harris and many others have also lied repeatedly about how many overseas bases the USA has. They claim we have 800 of them, but they hugely padded the number by counting large bases as multiple segments. For instance, Diego Garcia is a single huge base, but Harris et al count it as 12 or 15 different bases just because there are 12 or 15 different administrative segments. They do this with Rammstein, Thule, Guantanamo, and every other US military base...they count the adminstravice sections of every base, instead of counting a whole base as 1 installation.
People need to know how they are being lied to.
Please make a video addressing some disinformation that I see at lease 10 times per day on Twitter -- that Ukraine is about money laundering.
Does bunker branding offer and whiskey tumblers per chance?
Hi ikvetch
Are they really “lying” as you imply or are they just misinforming?
Ryan uses irrelevant metaphors constantly but I don’t see you complaining about that form of misinformation.
Just saying if you going to be a useless bægël Ëater at least be consistent.
"The problem with Johnny Harris is that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about until he talks about something you know about”…truer words have never been spoken
I remember my friends and I had the same realization about Elon Musk after he took over Twitter and started talking about why it was so inefficient.
A young Peter Z
@@Sturmjager weird that twitter is still running for over a year with ‘skeleton’ staff hey?
This generally applies to all situations where experts in a field know more about a situation than journalists do. On the other hand, generalists such as journalists don't have an axe in the fire, there is no selfish motivation to want one side to prevail. Journalists on the other hand have motivation to make their video more entertaining, which often aims to provoke intense feeling. There's no easier way to do that than to present a one sided argument.
I'm glad someone is calling out Johnny Harris. He used to work for Vox, who make highly polished videos on a variety of subjects. He quit Vox and started his own RUclips channel doing the same thing. He is insufferable. People are lured in by his fancy looking graphics and are tricked into thinking the man knows what he's talking about.
Johnny Harris has gotten the anger of
1) Ukraine War experts.
2) Economists (PhD)
3) Historians.
4) Globalism experts.
It's rare for one man to get the anger of so many types of people independently.
Don’t forget Christians!
His videos also have a massive reach. Just because people are annoyed doesn't mean they are right, or that all of his stuff is wrong.
@@shadician It’s not that people don’t agree with his viewpoints. It’s that he often trivializes or blatantly lies about his content.
@@shadicianBut once your integrity has been questioned on one video, then everything else needs to also be taken into question. Everyone makes mistakes, but the thing is - he almost NEVER acknowledges them, and instead doubles down on his erroneous material. It's been shown for many of his videos that he either has faulty sources, or a severe lack of them in the first place, and he lets his political bias heavily cloud his conclusions. He's really not worth watching
“ It's rare for one man to get the anger of so many types of people independently.”
Not when they are all the same entity 🫠.
ps you forgot the Military Industrial Complex and Global Media control.
As someone who is on the far left of the political spectrum. I find your videos invaluable to balance my media diet. You haven’t change my views but you have made them much more nuanced. I appreciate you!
Good for you for choosing to diversify your daily content! Keep at it! You'll be shocked in a few years how much you will learn about both sides of the isle. This is just friendly advice, but I would highly advise you to stay away from either the far left or the far right...the answer is always somewhere in the middle. So if someone is on either *far* side of the spectrum, they are severely misinformed through manipulation tactics and sadly...lies. The quicker you realize there's people out there who profit solely off keeping people on the far right and far left, the quicker you will start being able to instantly see through manipulative people that are trying to take advantage of you.
@@emberphoenix2922how do you define "far left"?
I find him kinda good for a lot of things, after a while you learn to sift away the information that is maybe not exactly as apolitical as it seems but its a good perspective from experience
@@HalfEatenMushroom Well, it depends on whether you are in Europe or the USA... in the States, they have totally absurd ideas about the political spectrum: to give a simple example, Sanders and AOC are considered "socialists", when they are nothing more than left-wing moderates ... to give you another example, I have heard many define KH as a "communist"...🤣 politicians like Harris, in Europe, are considered centrist, and on some ideas she has (regarding international politics) she could also be considered center-right.
@@HalfEatenMushroomyou can test it yourself: ask 10 Americans to define the term "Marxism"; or you can make it even simpler: ask them to define the even more generic term "communism": you will get 10 answers, and most likely all totally different (and above all wrong😆)
Been waiting for this one Ryan, love it !
How can a regular civ combat propagand like this?
👍👍👍
Hi 👋
Never expected you to be here!
Bro you’re here 😂
Worst part about people lying is that it takes seconds to do. And then it can take hours to expose.
A lie travels half way around the world before the truth can put its shoes on
Like "Mexico will pay for the wall" "Tariffs are things that other countries pay" "Our economy is in the toilet" "Gangs are taking over apartment buildings, regardless of what the local police say" "Haitians are eating pets" "the Left is making illegal immigrants vote 18 times" etc etc etc.
And then you get elected POTUS.
On a recent channel 5 video, which I do like channel 5 btw, someone said that 50 percent of the US budget is going to military and the video made it seem like it was true. I looked it up and it was wrong and it only took a quick Google search, real bruh why can't you check this moment. It's like 13 percent btw.
Listening on this video, I don't see any clear lies, Ryan is more confirming that what Jonny Harris is kind of true. Content angled in different ways but not clear lies. And Ryan is also not objective and this time got more emotional than analytical. Hearing stuff like the military R.D. is as much as the Morocco GDP, sounds lower than I thought. Stuff like that an diaper company have bigger earnings than big weapons company sounds reasonable. I think it's more important that baby buts keeps dry than killing more people.
The countries with higher % military budgets is crazy ones with dictators or in war situations, with the exception of Poland that is doing an big spending because of the obvious increased threat levels and the spending is not supposed to be permanent.
A lie can also get into the white house before the truth is out of bed.
On one hand, yes Johnny Harris is pretty bad. On the other Ryan is directly or tangentially connected to denfense industries and intel communities... Not shocked that Harris would be wrong about a lot, also Ryan saying the military industrial complex doesn't exist, is like hearing an Exxon spokesperson deny climate change...
Took the words right out of my mouth! This video makes me feel a bit different about Ryan, seems shady
His logic is that the military industrial complex doesnt exist because:
A) The top 4 defense contracters generate less revenue than Procter and Gamble... which btw isnt true
B) Other industries like Tech (most of the 10 largest corporations on eath), and Oil+Gas (the 2nd largest industry in the World) are bigger
@@user-wy2fu4un8r he always been shady, I think the most shady was the Israel issue and either trying to protray it in a vacuum or tackling lowest hanging fruit, similar to ther agenda drives, like atun shei.
@@boredphysicist Its not the amount of money, its the fact it all comes from government contracts, not private industries
@boredphysicist no, his point is that it doesn't exist as a coherent, powerful group.
There use to be a united, powerful lobby referred to as "the military industrial complex" but it's not powerful or united like that anymore.
We spent a lot of money on the military when we fought people, and then we spent less money cause we thought we wouldn't have to fight anyone anymore.
But now, we may have to fight someone again so we need the money to get ready to fight china.
There was corruption and bad stuff before, and there may be again, but if you want a military you need to spend the money.
I unsubscribed from Johnny Harris channel due to inaccurate information in his videos.
too much budget in edition, not so much in information value
Military industrial complex is real and to say it’s not real make no sense there are companies that make weapons and to say they control all wars is probably wrong but they likely do have influence in business of war so say it’s not real inaccurate
@@Unknown-r2p2o What is the market cap of Lockheed Martin? Raytheon? Boeing?
What's the market cap of Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, and WalMart?
War is bad for trade. Military contractors do not have nearly enough money to do what you're suggesting.
Literally every video of his is extremely biased or filled with miss-information
As did I, he once said humans make their own vitamin C…
Johnny lies about a LOT of shit.
cause he's saying stuff people wanna hear.. which alot of them are lies.
It's part of his elder hipster personality, He can't help it.
his Israel/Palestine video is TERRIBLE .
@@arreca09The guy omits important ass context which would completely change the BS pro-Palestine narrative…
Script writers in his 11 person team
You’re guilty of similar lack of context errors. P&Gs largest segment (both gross revenue and profit) was “Fabric and Home Care”, not the segment that includes diapers…which are related to defense spending how?
And your comment about how many pages you need to fill out for a grant isn’t evidence against a military industrial complex, if anything it’s evidence for it. Unnecessary complexity favors the status quo. Who can afford to pay experts with experience filling out complicated government forms? Big contractors with experience filling out complicated government forms.
Finally, you want to compare spending to GDP but you fail to compare lobbying budget to market capitalization. Okay, Meta’s is 1.4 trillion and Lockheed’s is 127 billion, so to be equivalent Meta should be spending 11x more, which they aren’t. But it’s a 💩 argument either way.
Does JH present an unbiased truth? No. Does Ryan McBeth? Also, no. I wish it was otherwise. Fact checking all these so called sources of truth gets really old. Worse, you’re playing the same game he is, while claiming you’re not. 😔
Yea a lot of this guys points don’t even dispute Harris’s
Its sad to see so many commenters just bash and make fun of JH whilst glaringly ignoring the shortcomings of this video's arguments
Calling Johnny Harris a journalist is a real streeeeeetch.
I'd call him a Propagandist.
Importantly, it's not. He actually _is_ a journalist. But he's a journalist whose gone rogue, offleash, he's his own editor, and that's bad because there clearly isn't someone to soberly and critically review the work before it goes out. That's why news orgs. the reputable ones, have editorial boards. And That's why it's important to give him shit. He's an actual journalist by training and profession and working background, but now he doesn't have any sort of senior editorial board and his channel needs cash, they're under time pressure to push out content.
Just watch his "UFO" video and laugh... its so bad.
His “journalism” is his Truth.
And indeed there is plenty to disagree with.
@@seacucumberable couldn’t agree more.
Like Ryan said about human errors, I don’t think he is pushing lies to intentionally mislead people. I understand it as a lack of peer review and perhaps a problematic environment inside the company.
Saying Procter & Gamble is a diaper company is like calling Nestle a chocolate milk company. Titans in their respective industries is all Im saying
And Johnson and Johnson is lubricant company 👍
Agreed, I didn't think diapers was the comparison he was going to make, that's how many products he had to choose from. But it was a funny one!
This is what ryan mcbeth does!
Procter & Gamble has at least 42 different brands operating under their umbrella globally, the fact that they are extremely profitable does not disprove the military industrial complexes existence.
@@samuelkey1185 I think we agree here
P&G doesn't "sell diapers," they sell damned near everything. They have a massive fucking product line, from common, every-day items to highly specialized ones. I like your channel, but if you're going to do throw stones, makes sure its not in a glass house.
'if you're going to throw stones, make sure that you don't live on a glass house'. And what he meant is that a single company is bigger than the alleged Military Complex. Also, I do believe that the bigger expense isn't going straight into equipment. But I digress. I rather have facts, than what I want to hear. Ryan does an excellent job at unmasking snake oil sellers, and plain foreing agents born in the very USA.
... But they _do_ sell diapers, right?
Look up “hyperbole” in the dictionary.
It was a misleading and poor use of hyperbole.
Its like trying to say big pharma doesnt exist because "The coal industry, who just sell bits of old tree, is larger than the medicine industry"
He also argues Military lobbying isnt real just because one of the 4 most valuable companies in the entire world spends more lobbying than one single defense company
I have a Master's Degree in political science, and when I was working on my Ph.D one of my professors proposed to the University to establish a course to educate journalists in political science, since he was baffled about all the miss-information on the news all the time. The program never got off the ground because there was no interest from journalists in actually taking that class.
Same thing happened when a course was proposed that would teach constitutional rights to the cops... 🤔
Former Poli Sci major here turned journalism major! I couldn’t agree more! OMG, the people who covered the election in my college newsroom have ZERO clue how the electoral college even worked. They had no idea what the swing states were nor how the process of our government or other comparative governments work. It’s insane to me. These are the people that we are supposed to “trust” with disseminating information.
@@ethancohen12no knowledge of the workings of the electoral college? Not even swing states… I think your college might be the problem on that one 😂
Also Poli Sci graduate here. One of my main research topics was the weakness of Polisci when it came to talking to other disciplines, especially technology. It's why I love this channel specifically. A lot of Poli Sci theory pulls from economics but is lacking input from other disciplines. How often have we heard politician trying to explain complex technological concepts or security concerns during a congressional hearing and failing? And I'm not even completely faulting them for it, on the other side, someone in who works in software development might create something unaware of the security, political and normative impact it could unleash, which is exactly what we're seeing with AI and social media.
Also it makes me laugh at Ryan tangent about the term global hegemon. That term was beaten into my head from professors with different political beliefs. Someone didn't read Enders Game.
I remember the journalism students in college. That's where you went when virtually every other door, even the "soft sciences," were closed to you. The field is not taken nearly as seriously as its role in democracy demands.
Lol, you were the first person that came to mind, when I saw Johnny's video! And I was waiting for your response (because, what do _I_ know about this stuff??). Boy, did you NOT disappoint!
unfortunately, he did disappoint a fair number of people, even those who don't like harris. lol.
It's a bit hypocritical to call P&G "a diaper company" with no other context when you spend your entire video blasting Jonny Harris for doing the same thing.
Is it hypocritical when the majority of sales is actually the diapers?
good thing he didn't. there's valid criticism of johnny for this video, but this isn't one of them. he said they're a company that sells diapers. he didn't call them a diaper company.
Babe wake up! Ryan Mcbeth dropped his Johnny Harris diss track!
🍿
Babe: Hold Ya FARD Before Diddy 🤯👀
Johnny Harris - Agenda Contributor
The World Economic Forum
There i exposed everything he does and stand for. In a two-liner, copied from the official WEF website.
Now I start the rabbit hole of other people trashing Johnny Harris. I've never even heard of Johnny until now
@@shawn576I think it was a year ago or something that a bunch of RUclipsrs jumped on criticizing Johnny Harris in which he actually made some corrections to his videos. I wonder what will happen now
“What did Johnny Harris get wrong in his video” needs to accompany every one of his videos.
It’s incredibly generous to call him a journalist, he’s a story-teller.
no. He is a storyteller that is partnered and paid by the WEF. so that agenda makes it propaganda, not just any story.
@ So, no, he’s not a storyteller… but yes, he is a storyteller?
@@iOSAT storyteller would be neutral. he would lie for personal gain and fame at worst. he is doing active propaganda for an organisation. it's sooo much worse than just telling a lie. it's telling a lie on purpose to misinform you for the gain of others.
@@texasranger24
storyteller
noun
sto·ry·tell·er ˈstȯr-ē-ˌte-lər
: a teller of stories: such as
a: a relater of anecdotes
b: a reciter of tales (as in a children's library)
c: LIAR, FIBBER
d: a writer of stories
@@iOSAT Regarding Mr. Harris, I'll take "C: Liar, fibber".
My mother was a journalist. Months of work, countless hours on the phone, nights and days of intellectual work connecting the dots, meeting with experts, studying some documents to DISCOVER the truth.
Johnny is an attractive RUclipsr who loves stories and maps but not discovering the truth, just making it up.
Interviewing a peace activist for a supposedly unbiased perspective of military spending just shows he had an agenda from the start.
Everyone has an agenda.
I mean if he had some other perspectives it would be reasonable, but everyone he had was anti-military
@@tommcfadden5232 I follow his channel and he has made some howlers of errors, I would say his stuff if full of errors that I can see, so how many do I not see since I am not an expert in each field. he is entertaining and interesting enough to make me sometimes go research and find out more, which is not a bad thing. But I would advise anyone to take him with at least a large dose of salt if not several and treat him as an entertainment rather than education. We all have agendas from our personal history and upbringing and to make factual content our logic and reason has to overrule our emotions.
Say that to Andrew Bustamente 😮
Sure, but on the other hand, interviewing someone from the pentagon would indicate an agenda too.
Johnny is piece of work. I stopped taking him seriously after his "North Korea is not a serious threat" video.
He is just another mouth on the internet that cherrypicks information that fits his crap narrative about the world.
I mean he's not entirely wrong there, the NK threat is not directly from the state of North Korea but from its much more powerful/capable allies China and Russia.
Not even a Nuke from North Korea is a threat to the US, we'd see it launch and shoot it down with the 7 different anti-air/missile platforms we've been designing since the 70s for this exact purpose.
But if North Korea invaded South Korea or vice versa, it can spiral out of control extremely quickly and that resulting spiral is where the threat is.
His worst takes never even come close to the blatant stpdty of claiming the military industrial complex doesn’t exist.
@@TheDreadPirateRoberts-jr2fk ryan is so dumb on this point. makes some vague point about profit and how tech companies make more profit. the name of the game in governmetn contracts is to make costs as high as possible and limit profit (on paper) - this allows you to charge more for contracts. really simple stuff that ryan misses.
Is it a "serious threat"? Is it imaginable that it won't get flattened by South Korea in minutes flat if they were to try to pull some shit?
Though i have little doubt that they might try to pull some shit regardless, and that holding them back from doing that is not something one should just stop.
Gotta Have REAL Eyes To Realize Real Lies 👀💯
If you think a 40 page grant for $75,000 is bad, wait until you find out that education, arts, and healthcare organizations often have to fill out the same amount or more for only $6,000.
For real. Grant writing is such a mind-numbing process.
Yes but one is a legitimate use of government and one is not
@@christiangrosjean2980 you're going to look really dumb if you went around polling people whether they think $6,000 for a STEM project for students is a better way to spend the governments' money or hundreds of thousands of dollars for research for the Hellfire R-9X, which has only been used effectively on less than 10 people.
@@christiangrosjean2980 agreed. STEM education is far more legitimate that hundreds of thousands of dollars for R&D of a hellfire missile that uses blades, which will be used on less than 20 people.
Calling P&G a diaper company is like calling Apple a headphone company.
Yes. I’d been trying to think of an analogy… I came up with “like calling Amazon a podcast hosting company”
That’s what i was saying, like they make so so much more
For real. They make pretty much every cleaning supply I own and like half of the personal care products I own
To be fair, he didn't call P&G "a diaper company". He said that P&G was "a company that sells diapers". He didn't say that P&G sold only diapers or something similar.
The idea in this case was to compare the stock prices and he made an example of what was profitable and what not. Just mentioning diapers was a good opposite to "bad greedy defence", demonized by Harris.
@ProPatria1919 its disingenuous. The implication is that they're making more selling diapers than defense contractors. I don't agree with Harris, but why call P&G a company that sells diapers?
The GDP of Morocco is like... 2% the GDP of California.
So you’re saying California can become a military superstate.
@@raiderdare7462 Cali can't keep the sheets off the streets
@@raiderdare7462 Economy of Cali would make 5th biggest in the world, bigger than Canada, India or France.
@@door1479 and now include how a lot of their tax money goes to other "poorer" states
@@nikolaideianov5092 Other states ARE poorer. California has money, they just choose where to allocate it poorly.
Not taking sides in the F-35 controversy, but...
The answer to "Did the military-industrial complex trick Poland into buying a fighter that didn't work?" isn't as obvious as you might think. A number of polish procurement decisions had been ostensibly based on hype and/or political calculations, so just because we bought it doesn't mean there's no problems with the thing. It's also worth remembering the F-104 scandal.
Polska gurom
One additional reason comparing military spending in US dollars doesn't always make sense is that many countries can buy a lot more for a dollar than we can in the US, known as the price parity index. Something I learned from Perun's videos.
Yeah, it gets really tiring to see people from the West... particularly the US...act like "oh my gosh, it's so cheap to live in such and such country?!?!!???" and not seem to realize that it's cheap for US, but not for THEM because the economy of countries outside of the West (and a handful of the 1st world countries that exist outside of the West) are often vastly lesser with lesser purchasing power and drastically reduced wages of the average populace. So yeah, that $3 lunch you had in Russia doesn't mean that Russia is some amazing utopia where greedy capitalists haven't taken over...when you consider the average Russian only makes on average about $350 a month, that $3 starts looking a LOT more expensive than you would have thought
Also why Poland's (and the Baltic countries) armament expenditures are doubly effective.
They don't adjust for that? They should. Like how everyone adjusts for inflation if they're talking about housing in the 40s or the stock market crash of 1929. There's a lot of context missing if you say your grandparents bought their home after the war for $11,000.
@MakerInMotion you *can* adjust for that, or at least do get decently close. The problem is, if you're trying to argue the US is substantially more wasteful in military spending, why would you want to? It can only ever lower any numbers your using for comparison.
You could probably make a career of debunking Johnny Harris.
A channel called The Present Past has an excellent video explaining how bad Johnny is at research and story telling
Even the worst people on RUclips like BadEmpanada have clowned on Johnny
What Ryan is not talking about when it comes to congressional members that own stock in defense contractors, is that they selectively enter positions shortly before the company gets a contract and the price goes up. It's not like they bought it 20 years ago and just let it ride...they time the market, because they are writing the policy that will benefit or cripple the market.
The viewer that had the comment "he knows what he's talking about until he talks about what you know about" is so much more correct than they know.
My chemistry degree is the main reason I have no faith in basically any media outlet any more. The amount of confident incorrectness by everyone is astonishing.
That’s similar to what happened when I watched CSI, and they showed droplets of blood freezing in mid air at 20 degrees F.
This is Ryan’s channel when he talks about international relations.
Or really anything outside of specific anti-tank platforms.
His channel was decent when he only dealt in his area of expertise.
@TheDreadPirateRoberts-jr2fk
For example...? Like do you have any specific examples or just vague... whatevers?
My degree in finance screams out the same.
@@theodorekorehonen Ryan’s Project 2025 video. A lot of commenters noted he was just doing a word search and didn’t read the actual texts. He was noticeably more critical about Project 2025’s military policies.
Johnny Harris complaining about the consolidation of the US defense industry to cut DoD costs and using that as an example of why the military spends too much money is... something. Not sure I would call that a good argument though.
He started with a conclusion and found anything he perceived as proof to confirm his bias.
Yeah. there are significantly easier arguments to reveal millitary spending waste where contractors kinda scam the government. one example is arbitrary nonsensical limits on repairs that don't improve safety and only serve to profit contractors. the issue is that doesn't fit his narrative and only leads to the military improving it's practices rather than encourage people to be anti-military which is his actual goal.
Your comparison to defense contractors to P&G I think is a prime example of a false equivalency. And playing them down as just a diaper manufacturer is misleading. They make a huge assortment of consumable home goods like toothpaste deodorant, soaps paper towels etc. Things that every single person buys weekly or monthly. And they don't just sell in America. Your comparing that high tech gear sold only to the US government and approved allies. It is a massive false equivalency to try to compare these two industries
As a former defense lobbyist (we like to call it government relations) the truth is somewhere in-between the situations Ryan and Johnny present. Like all complex things, they are more grey than black or white.
tell us more
Ryan is full of s*** Comparing with diaper companies is stupid There's only a couple companies and they have a Monopoly on the market So yeah diaper companies make a fortune make a fortune and these politicians they know when to invest in these military tech companies. When to get in once I get out and make a fortune just more cherry picking from Ryan Macbeth and I am very pro-military but I smell this guy's BS a mile away he's a profiteer of War if soldiers don't bleed he doesn't make any money
@@romanstingler435
I can give you one example from current events although I'm not a former lobbyist...
I don't have the time to give a list of citations so you'll have to fact check...
Some politically and financially motivated pundits and politicians have created a narrative that Chinese consumer and enterprise drones are a threatto US national security.
Why would they do that? There's been no substantiating evidence presented and to the contrary there have been several independent audits that show no threat. As far as I can tell the narrative started from so-called experts trying to make a name for themselves.
Over in the last 10 years a few American companies tried to produce drones and they were total failures as drones and as companies.
During that time some MIT students created a company called Skydio which dabbled in this and that, mainly focused on trying to come up with a drone for deliveries. Then they decided to take a shot where all the others had failed and released a consumer drone in 2018. It totally failed.
Skydio realized that the consumer market was too hard so they shifted to enterprise first responder and military markets. They struggled there as well and while they have now finally come out with a drone that somewhat usable it's still half as capable as the Chinese equivalent and cost 5 times more. So about to fail again Skydio decided to get political and have the competition banned from the US market.
Recently Skydio has been spending tons of money to sway politicians like Stephanik and Texter, to perpetuate the false narrative of a national security threat and to higher people with ties to politicians.
Skydio can't produce drones that compete with DJI so they're trying to have DJI banned. Not just from the military market, they also want it banned from consumers, hobbyist and small businesses. Skydio has one drone model that is not suitable for 99% of the American market. They're not trying to build in American drone industry they're trying to destroy it, making themselves the only option. Some corrupt American politicians are happy to take the money.
If you want more specific information leave a comment and I can try to come up with a reading list for you. There's a channel called steel city drones that has been covering the latest attempts to get Skydio banned through the NDAA and other legislation.
DJI imports are currently being held at customs because because somebody in the government alleges that they used slave labor to produce the drones. Our government doesn't have a problem with Chinese labor for hundreds of billions of dollars of products, but 10 million worth of drones is all a sudden a problem?
THANK YOU!!!
I needed to hear a sane voice!
Gotta Have REAL Eyes To Realize Real Lies 👀
The Stinger missile segment is a good analogy to why the SR-71 Blackbird wasn't brought back from retirement when the GWOT kicked off. You can't just fire up a shut down assembly line from the 1960's to make specialty parts, and even if you could, the costs would be extremely prohibitive.
I've found that the left and the "educated classes" don't understand manufacturing and logistics
It's the same reason we can't just start building the Saturn 5 to go back to the moon
its a good example of what most people don't understand on these government budgets, sometimes cutting to 'save' ends up costing way more later on. some things will be lost forever.
It’s called obsolescence, we run into it so much because Uncle Sam doesn’t want to buy more or think they can save. Then they blow millions just to find a replacement part because they didn’t buy enough or ignored a recommendation for last time buy. It’s not even the people in the defenses fault many times when their budget is leveraged a million ways,and the funds have been allocated and it takes a helluva lot of work to get funds reallocated or find more funds to plus up the effort. Many times it’s rob peter to pay Paul. Or decide to just ignore Paul all together and decide to only feed Paul because someone somewhere felt that was the most cost effective thing, or pure personnel opinion and self interest. People seem to forget politicians do call the shots on certain discretionary spending based on information or real world situation and geopolitics. It no lie to say congress decided that or the senate defense oversight committee. Big budget programs live or die at the capitol building.
@@egondro9157 this isn't just a government problem, my dad did procurement for a major O&G company. On projects he often bought an extra container of parts, bolts, spares, etc. The reason, the project was $200 million, spending $40k on spares was a rounding error and when a certified bold is missing and holds up a whole crew for two days while DHL is overnighting the part from halfway around the world at an ungodly cost, having the parts you need is key.
The contractors in the millitary love change, change is money, change is profits.
This guy claiming the Military Industrial Complex doesn't exist because the key defense contracts don't make much profit. LOL That's not a bug, that's a feature my man. The company looks like it's not super profitable so us tax payers don't feel ripped off. But given that they markup the crap out of their own expenses, very little auditing and oversight exists, and the CEOs and other company leaders rake in dozens of millions in salaries and bonuses, so yeah on paper it doesn't look like they made profit but trust me, everyone up the chain is well fed.
So I'm a mostly left-leaning person, with a right-leaning view when it comes to cops and military. I saw the Johnny Harris video, and I was shaking my head. I have my own personal gripes about the right AND the left. I think everyone should call out their own side when they do something wrong. That's integrity. Johnny Harris, is in my opinion just as bad as someone like Tucker Carlson. They lie to your face about things and also don't take a moment to understand to other side of the political aisle. They don't talk to the other side, instead opting to only talk within their circle. This is the issue I have with both sides of the political spectrum. Just too extreme and non-factual, and unwilling to listen to dissenting opinions, and Johnny Harris is a contributor to that.
Thinking for yourself is not what you’re supposed to be doing dummy. Why aren’t you thinking exactly what you’re supposed to? Hate the “other” because that’s what I’m telling you to do.
Why don’t you trust me blindly?
Your “mostly left leaning but right leaning on cops and military. Maybe you are describing yourself as antifa? You should both incoherent and inconsistent
Your “mostly left leaning but right leaning on cops and military. Maybe you are describing yourself as antifa? You should both incoherent and inconsistent
This stuff is all about clicks, engagement and money. Truth rarely factors in.
Its all about telling people what they want to hear, doesn't matter if its true or not.
Sometimes you see someone like Johnny starting out kind of neutral politically, because they're testing out the audience and seeing where the easiest route to cash exists. Then once they fund that target audience, that is who they focus on, truth be damned.
Ryan seems to be about as straight a shooter as it gets. He's in this for the right reasons.
What were you testing? Looks like you were taste testing lead paint by the looks of it.
"US spends too much on military"
>US 3,5% GDP
>Poland 5% GDP
And if anything, Poland is the only sane NATO member right now. So you better double those F-35 acquisitions, dear americans, those are some rookie numbers right now 😅
Poland is in the middle of a massive military modernization, so it won't last.
US still spends more than CHINA while we have mediocre education & unaffordable healthcare.
Ukraine can count only Poland and the Baltic countries as its only truly authentic allies.
Poland never ever did spend 5% of GDP. Not even close. And let's not forget that Poland didn't even spend 2% before 2022/23, despite their geographical location. So, there obviously is some catching up to do for them.
Prior to 2022, Poland’s military spending was consistently around 2% of GDP, aligning with NATO guidelines. This reflected its strategic focus on regional security, particularly in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014.
I'm a big fan, Ryan, but you haven't done much to dispel myths on costs.
1. Based on GAO, F35 still has very high maintainence costs. Half of the planes aren't operational.
If capability was the only criteria to keep planes going, we would still have the Concorde.
Everyone would be owning a Maserati or a Range rover :)
2 Israel references for F35!
The US Foreign military financing funds these Israeli F35 aircrafts.
Taxpayers pay that.
And need that tech to fight...who again? Iran?
3. Politicians "investing" in defense contractor stocks over time is not the issue. The issue is when politicians are "trading" for quick gains. Day trading is not prohibited. Look up how many representatives frequently trade.
4. Transperency is still severely lacking. Ok. Older systems need to be fabricated n programmers, testers, operators rehired. Still need to provide the cost and how they reworking it now. Are they making them more modular now?
Is stinger which is made by one company, the sole choice?
5. Defense contractors wouldn't be making political contributions and lobbying if it wasn't profitable.
Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. Not some dude you going after !! Eisenhower warned us about runaway defense spending.
One of the reasons Soviet union collapsed was this heavy spending on military!
F35 allied dots are good for showing on the map. but Canada, Korea, Australia raised concerns on maintainence costs, design flaws.
Thank you. Came here for this.
I love to see things challenged, but he makes no real case for any of his responses. More clickbait than anything…
You listed a lot of nonsense
How much of the Soviet GDP was spent on defense before it's collapse? 🧐
Weird you're in other videos sympathizing with the Russians.
@@shy404usernotfound😃😀😀😀. Yer caught him. Yer sharp.
The worst part is that he's on Nebula which just puts a stain on the whole platform.
Don’t forget Second Thought was on there too before he said… what he said lol
@@sethivaltas619 I've never heard of second thought. I'm much newer to Nebula so please do tell.
@@bob38028 "settler babies" in Israel. That's all ya gotta know
@@sethivaltas619 Jesus. And to think he said that right after Oct. 7th.
What an impudent stain on the pro-Palestinian movement.
@@bob38028 true that
“That’s the GDP of the Congo! See how that doesn’t make any sense.”
Had me rolling. Perfect example.
example of what? is harris lying when he says we spend the GDP of entire nations on aspects of the military? we spend more in dollar amount than the next 5 biggest nation's budgets combined. lol
@@snowballeffect7812 And you believe China's public numbers? Now that's the lolz.
@@xayb9179 We can very easily calculate their GDP lol. Even if the numbers were off by double, they wouldn't come anywhere near the US lol.
@@snowballeffect7812 I'm talking about their military budget and you can't easily calculate their GDP either. The GDP is calculated using number that the nation themself reports. China being an authoritarian country with little in the way of transparency or internal checks/balances has and does fudge their numbers considerably.
A huge reason for why comparison to most other countries are not fair and why we should look at spending as a percentage of GDP is just wages.
Like for the Morocco example a US soldier seems to make about 10-20 times as much money as a Moroccan soldier, so it's no surprise that the US will spent way way more money. The US government has to compete on the American labor market where soldiers could get high wages working a 9-5 job, so they have to pay a lot of money.
Add to that the the US is a much bigger country engaged in global conflicts and not just in conquering a piece of dessert and US military spending suddenly dose not seem so unreasonable at all.
The first f35 was like 250 million, they are down to about 75 million each now
It's kind of the opposite of the situation where a politician tries to save money by cutting purchases, only to discover the unit cost skyrocketed.
the whole point is that the more units you buy the cheaper the price. Getting everyone to buy F-35s has made it an affordable stealth combat aircraft. The biggest problem within the military industrial complex is the desire for proprietary systems. If European navys standardized on a single ASW patrol Frigate, a single Air Defense Destroyer and a single Corvette type and then bought them in bulk the cost of the ships would shrink while the potential for improvements would go up.
@@MrChickennugget360 The problem with getting different countries to standardize on a single design is that each country has different requirements. Thats why international partnerships to develop things like fighters and tanks typically don't work out.
Maybe for some countries on their orders, but ours are definitely more than $75 million. When I was at Edwards during the X phase of the development, they were supposed to be far less than they ended up being. It was a hard plane to make work with the technology at the time, and a lot of work went into redoing the plane as technology rapidly progressed. Ultimately we could have had better aircraft for specialized purposes if we didn’t have to make it replace multiple airframes, but because of government bureaucracy we had to do it and ended up wasting more money and making an airframe that’s not great at everything it’s replacing. Everyone tries to profit off our needs in the military and it ends up hurting the end user and taxpayers. It really pisses me off how both political sides spend their time slinging mud at each other and both getting parts of it wrong. It’s possible we don’t need to spend as much to get more and we must have a strong military. It’s very important to be critical of government spending. Just like we spend more money on healthcare than anyone else, yet often times it’s a pretty mediocre experience. It’s nothing to be proud of spending more than anyone else on things, and not getting our money’s worth out of it. There are A LOT of people making more than they should off taxpayers.
Ryan dropping the line "And of course I can find his personal email and number because... y'know *shows a video of a MQ drone launching a hellfire missile* I'm Ryan"
Is such a badass line that only someone like Ryan can use
yawn
Did we watch the same video? Lol
🤮
I don't feel any strong affinity towards either of y'alls content, but I think that its interesting that you call out the "apples to oranges" comparison of comparing defense spending to a national GDP, but you use that same apples to oranges comparison style when comparing the size of P&G to large military contractors. I don't think you can in good faith compare the two without also recognizing you're creating a false equivalence. To put it in your own words: The top 5 defense contractors aren't P&G, bub. We're not the same size, we don't have the same customers, and we don't have the same competitors as P&G.
It makes me question how much of the things you say are also the silver tongue of a snake oil salesman...
a "centrist" motivated-researcher with a conflict of interest being a hypocrite? perish the thought!
@snowballeffect7812 Centrists aren't necessarily balanced. The word you are looking for is "unbiased".
@@lifeinanutshell7147 I think they were using that word intentionally to point out that both Ryan and Johnny are pedaling their respective narratives.
He'll probably show up here and thank you for the critique and point out how he tries to keep his videos running time in check and has to sacrifice things like context to do that. He does that a lot.
*a member of his staff
@@theodorekorehonenlies take less time
🤣
I served from 1980 to 1999, U.S. Army Reserves. I was a medic. My unit slowly diminshed to nothing and the GOA had calculated that too many Reservists were going to collect pensions. They ratcheted up the PT standards, seniority points systems, height weight profiling and performance reviews until they had gotten rid of many units and enough people who wouldn't get pensions. "Thank you for your service." often doesn't cut it when I realize I will not be getting a pension, that I wasn't allowed to get back in after 9/11, and many of the benefits I wouldn't have collected until I was 65 are now closed to me. People like Johnny Harris make me sick. Both the military and people like Harris fail to remember what is often attributed to Orwell:
"You sleep safely at night because rough men with guns stand ready to do violence upon those who would disturb your slumber."
I hope Mr. Harris sleeps well.
Damn, that sucks. Maybe the people you fight for may not care about you, at all?
@@thelordofnuggets629 The Russians do care about their people. For 3 weeks before they are sent to the front barelybknwoing how to operate a rifle
Reading your story almost brought tears to my eyes.. We ALL owe you and people like Ryan and yourself a giant thank you! I pay my taxes in hope that some part of it would go towards helping you to live decent life after the sacrifices you’ve made. This Johnny guy is a dishonest sleaze ball. Sincerely, Thank you for your service from the bottom of my LEGAL immigrant’s heart!
@@thelordofnuggets629 Whether they do or don't doesn't matter. I was there to do my duty. The difference between a civilian and a citizen is that a citizen makes it their personal responsibility to protect their people. It isn't just a Robert Heinlein quote. Its a lifestyle. That said. I did my job. That's what counts.
@@aljohnson3717 America enjoys its freedom, and they get to do so on the cheap. The amount of money spent on defense, while commendable compared to other nations who are closer to the threat than we are here, is the small price we pay because our enemy isn't within artillery range.
I worry more about the vets coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who struggle with all of the mental anguish and the lack of response from the military and the VA. We lose more soldiers to suicide than we did to twenty years of war. There needs to be a much more concerted effort in the mental healthcare field for these guys. I have what I need to get by in life, but I don't know how to translate that for others. I had help. Many are less fortunate. Help them.
And.... You're welcome. Glad to do my part.
You bill yourself a military "annalist" and youve never caught a dose of Hegemon?
lmao i also found that hilarious and i'm just a normal civilian software engineer lol.
The problem with a lot of RUclips "journalists" is that they got their credibility from basically being a travel blogger and people somehow morphed that into "this guy knows what he is talking about."
I had to laugh during the F-35 section. If you compare the F-35 to almost any aircraft the military has fielded since before WW2 you'd find that it has one of the best records out there. Hell, more than a few of the airframes developed during WW2 had a 50% or worse safety record and an operational record that wasn't much better. And just so we're clear, when I say safety record, I'm talking about crashes and deaths not in combat.
Hell just look at the USAF loss rate in the 1950’s
@@aepilotjim has anyone ever figured out why some P-51’s would break up in midair without being in combat?
@@aepilotjim mind you the plane just start rolling out and building off faces of safety data. I like to see the stats after a decade.
Dude, an American adult not knowing a common word like "hegemon" is just plain ignorant. Mocking someone just for using it is re***ded. Feel me?
He continuasly makes slight mocking remarks and refers to his profession, but yet he doesn't know basic terminology from IR? Is this an American issue where the perception of American military might is not accurately represented or taught or pure ignorance from his perspective. Anyways had me shocked as well lmao
I believe this is more of a vibe situation. We are always told we can't afford better health care and schools, but there is always money to increase the military budget. There is always billions to send to other counties, but we can't afford to increase SNAP benefits. This leads to the big number bad feeling. I always appreciate your reporting Ryan. There defiantly needs to be more military reporters on the online news networks.
But as he has shown in the video, we spend way less % of our gdp then most of the last 50 years. Spending on militairy is going down not up
The F-35 is a target because all cutting edge military technology looks like a haphazard mess if you look at it over it’s development period. Most of the time these developments start with requirements that are vague or impossible. Then as time goes on and what can be executed is narrowed down the roles and capabilities are refined. Then as other nations react and technology changes the requirements also change. Each of these stages rehash the project over and over again. When you’re building something that no one has ever done before, with capabilities that no one ever imagined, and completion that no one could quantify it’s bound to seem like an utter waste. Now wait 30-60 years and all of a sudden we’ll forget all that and say how well it’s served its role and how it’s a shame we need to replace it.
Look back at the F-15, B-52, A-10 and people called those projects a disaster at the time. Now we call them some of the finest aircraft produced. In fact he F-15 (correction F-14) was labeled as bloated and a waste until all of a sudden this movie called “Top Gun” came out and then everyone said it was amazing and iconic.
It’s hilarious how people keep trying to dunk on the F-35, the latest Sandbox News video points this out, and makes the point how the F-35 literally has a better accident rate than the F-16 does, and its availability rate isn’t much worse, and is mostly related to software upgrades. It’s bonkers that people still keep complaining about it as some shining example of corruption or US incompetence or something.
DDG-51 was also a mess. Now it's the mainstay of the surface force.
@@phishphood423now yep there is corruption. It exists in government and non-government. There is waste, fraud, abuse, etc. there is also a lot of politics in government (go figure). There is a lot of politics in large businesses too.
I’ve been an insider, a contractor, a consultant, in the fully public sector, private sector, startup and global multinational. The game changes but a lot of it is the same.
There are time when the rules are followed, times when they are not. Sometimes that works out well, sometimes not. But almost every example I’ve seen it’s always a lot of people working with what they got and trying. Which is more than what happens in a lot of other places where corruption is just the way 75% of the time.
It’s hilarious how people keep trying to dunk on the F-35, the latest Sandbox News video points this out, and makes the point how the F-35 literally has a better accident rate than the F-16 does, and its availability rate isn’t much worse, and is mostly related to software upgrades. It’s bonkers that people still keep complaining about it as some shining example of corruption or US incompetence or something.
Top gun was the F-14, but yes.
The problem with politicians investing in the defense stocks is that they know when to buy right before a large contract and the stock jumps up. They often day trade defense contractors with insider knowledge. You only spoke about long term investments with defense contractors which is a totally different thing.
Johnny Harris continuously lies in almost all of his videos**
I don't think it's entirely his fault if he's like that, he grew up in a mormon family so lies always been around him since he was a baby. In this community they basically don't have too much choice but to lie regularly or they'll quickly get in trouble.
(BTW I know it because he made a video about this. I mean about being a Mormon, not about being a liar... lol)
@@Alfred-Neuman Well without Lies Mormonism dies. Their whole cult is based around lies so you’re 100% right
@@Alfred-NeumanI mean, you could make the same argument about Ryan and Catholicism.
Truth is, both choose to lie.
Johnny Harris - Agenda Contributor
The World Economic Forum
Any more questions? No? Good.
@@texasranger24 Exactly, he’s literally a talking head for the globalist agenda and just regurgitates their accepted opinions and views. And all videos come back to way they want
I work for pratt and whitney, we don't make any money on selling engines, we make money on parts and service.. that is 100% across the board, from commercial to military engines.
70% on average of any military major acquisition is lifecycle sustainment costs, not the actual purchase. Think about the parts and maintenance it takes on a new car over its lifetime.
Just like car dealerships
@EverettBurger when car dealerships tack on a "adjustment fee" for market price, thats theft. We literally agree on a dollar per a unit and if it costs more we eat it, if it costs less, we have to disclose that and lose that profit.. its part of the procurement transparency and regulations.
This is the sticky market when you are the only vendor with a qualified replacement part. The part is priced on how expensive it is to get the plane back in the air not what it costs to make it.
Military equipment is expensive. It always has been. In the mid 1930s UK tried to re-arm on the cheap. WW1 artillery was dusted off and tarted up. Then they got their a*ses kicked in France & Belgium. The men were extracted at Dunkirk but the equipment got left behind. UK had to rapidly build new gun systems and tanks. USA provided most of the vehicles at very reasonable prices. UK made the final debt payment in the 1990s.
I will never understand why people feel the need to lie about the US. There is enough factual stuff to criticize without having to lie about it. It must be exhausting.
Agree. I'm sure there is plenty wrong with military procurement and overall defense policy but a fair look would compare it with other government activities and other countries.
Even asking what the quantum is would need comparison with others. Harris says USA outspend all other countries ignoring that list includes China Russia Iran north Korea who have all made public statements threatening the USA and the USA might have to fight all four at once...hence the need to outspend them
Because coming to a more nuanced perspective takes a whole lot of effort. At least when compared to rattling off intellectually dishonest talking points which you know 99% of your audience won't bother to fact check because they already want to believe in a certain conclusion.
@@Fyr35555 ". . .because they already want to believe in a certain conclusion." Ouch. That truth bomb hurts. Well said.
Best country in the world.
@@Oblitus1a truth bomb that probably cost 17 gazillion
Please explain to everyone how Ukraine funding goes to our factories to produce weapons and ammunition. How this government spending helps our nation
Ukraine gets weapons
Bit then the us makes more of the same or most likely better weapons to keep their stocks from going down
And becose of scale they become cheaper
yeah, see the Stinger Missile example; not doing so would cost more.
US dumps it's old(er) stock into Ukraine and the 'funding' price-tag could either be the cost of that stock, or the cost of it's replacements (although people rarely clarify). US wins by not having to scrap out-dated or expired equipment; Ukraine wins by being able to use them; the (non-existent) Industrial Military Complex wins by retain jobs and institutional knowledge
@@Hevlikn everyone wins
Exept russia but we arent exacly asking them
@@nikolaideianov5092 well.... The ones losing their lives on the battlefield at the whims of the insulated and uncaring elites
@@Hevlikn yeah
But litteraly noone is asking them
Including their own goverment
The point about tech stocks being more profitable than military stocks is awful. Johnny Harris didn't say that military stocks are the most profitable. He said that it's bad that the people in charge of deciding funding for these companies personally make more money when they give these companies more. People in the government shouldn't have monetary incentives that align with companies that are entirely propped up by government spending.
Johnny Harris has always been a fishy guy. Heard a lot about him getting information wrong on his videos so that’s why I don’t watch him. Glad you made a video on this guy.
He definitely leaves a lot of major details out of events. It always seemed like bias recounting rather than being straight forward
You Gotta Have REAL Eyes To Realize Real Lies 💯👀
Same here … always feel that there is something fishy about him …
@KamBar2020
I'm assuming you're a bot since you're spamming this nonsensical comment?
3:00 You cant deny that there is not a childcare industrial complex.
The human race
This is the 3rd video where he says he's going to disprove "lies".... When in reality, he just disagrees with the importance of data. Theres a difference between a "lie" and "disagreement".
Ryan is just a troll.
He is not a journalist he is an activist.
🎯
As if journalists exist anymore...
I worked putting together and running what were probably the first autonomous vehicles, US army tanks, as target vehicles for weapons testing for the US military back in 1979. I drove tanks with no brakes. I climbed into a burning tank to shut off the engines. I chased on foot a runaway tank with a berserk computer, in total darkness in a snowstorm at Ft. Riley, KS. I had a secret clearance and I was paid $7.50 an hour, an average tech wage in the town I worked at the time. I've worked at other Mil contracting jobs. They paid me the going tech rate. What costs so much for military stuff wasn't my pay. It is ensuring that military gear works under all conditions, hot, cold, wet dry, day, night, in dust, in snow, after it's been dropped, after it's been run over, under every scenario. I saw certification paperwork verifying a 24 hour burn-in of each individual 5 cent resistors for a flight circuit bd for a spy satellite. The testing costs far more than the resistors. But it's necessary. You don't replace a resistor in a spy satellite in orbit. The costs of military supplies is what it is because it needs to be. Having said that, I'm very much in favor of close supervision of every military contract. It's a whole lot of money, and wherever there is a whole lot of money there are always a whole lot of people looking to get some for themselves.
BTW, Project 2025 is not something that reasonable Americans want, but it IS what they have voted for, so they will get it. They voted for donald trump, and what happens from now on isn't what they will want, but what they voted for. Yes, people can vote to be self-destructive, and so they did. It's a Darwin Award kinda thing.
My understanding is that Project 2025 did not come from Trump, it came from a think tank with no affiliation with Trump. He may well do some of it, but it is not his baby.
"But you voted for it" is such a cop out. You had a binary choice, and one of the choices wasn't even elected by the party members, they were anointed. And here you are blaming the people for voting between two terrible options. Sure buddy.
Insider trading is a huge issue which exists outside of defense contractors. However, saying that it isn't an issue for defense contractors, because defense contracts are not profitable is incorrect because the officials can profit off of micro-trends which they have control of and than sell.
Proctor & Gamble does a LOT more than diapers. That’s not a great comparison.
Agreed, he is doing the same thing with that point as he is exposing Harris for doing.
True, but the point still stands. If you’re an investor, military investment is not a good way optimize your returns. That said, I don’t think Ryan’s point was a clear rebuttal of Harris’s insinuation of greed on the part of defense personnel. I mean, they could just be incompetent or lazy at investing.
Yeah that felt like such a weird point to emphasize, like yeah it is a decent comparison but P&G has its hands in so many consumer products more than diapers
@@sulblazerare there any errors in his MIC video
Took a lot of his points away with that comparison
Johnny Harris is a character who only sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and he usually talks plain nonsense. He is trying to be Veritasium without investigative journalism, that is, his sources are "reddit, I told you so bro, trust me" and the big media like buzufeed articles 😅
Yup
I'm not a fan of Johnny Harris. He makes content that is made to be easy to digest and as a consequence- a ton gets missed. BUT... You were clearly triggered hard by his video. its obvious you approached his video the same way he approach his video; you had a point of view to advance with a hardened conclusion, and you filled in the blanks to advance that conclusion.
You entirely missed the point of many of Harris' arguments. For example- he wasn't comparing the USA to Morocco. He was using that figure to give an idea of scale...
You go on to explain why the "revolving door" exists. Yes- no shit- this info is not in dispute. Again you entirely missed the point. The issue is not why the system operates this way- but the very fact that it operates this way.
And dude- we get it, you were this and that and you studied this and that and bla bla bla. We don't need to hear about it several times a video. Or I guess you feel like we do...?
The fact that the five major defense contractors make less than proctor and gamble does not mean there isn’t a military industrial complex. The two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Agreed.
Talk about the MIC makes it look like something overwhelming, overpowering, that effectively runs the US from the shadows. Showing that it's smaller than P&G puts that into perspective and makes it clear, that it doesn't.
@@kaszaspeter77 It’s comparing apples to oranges. P&G doesn’t rely on government contracts (taxpayer dollars) to remain in business. The MIC does. You’re point, however, is a valid one. The term, “Military Industrial Complex”, is used pejoratively. This may very well bias one’s arguments and analysis from the start.
@@kaszaspeter77 P&G's market cap is 400 billion dollars. lockhead's is like 125 billion. P&G is a gigantic multinational corporation. 74% of lockheed's net sales are accounted for by the US government lol. 60%+ is from DOJ alone. The MIC is real and alive. There's no reason that stinger missile is marked up that high but for the fact that the military needs it that badly and was willing to pay that amount. any capitalist would do the same thing in their position lol.
Thanks Ryan, Johnny Harris’ videos are entertaining and engaging. Like many pundits I also enjoy them until they talk about something I have expertise in. Thanks for the straight talk.
Meta spends more on lobbying. Okay? So? Who cares? This is whataboutism. That Meta also lobbies does not offset the fact that there is lobbying done by defense contractors. Johnny Harris rightfully raises those issues as a concern and you essentially just confirms that it happens but says it's not a big deal because others lobby and lobby more. Set aside the fact that there is a difference with a defense contractor lobbying and a tech company, it is still bad for democracy no matter who does it.
A more mature response would be to acknowledge that while not exclusive to defense contractors (which never was the claim btw) that lobbying is bad no matter who does it. That Lockheed does it is not something we should celebrate or divert away from as a non-issue. There's other stuff like this in your video, but this one stuck out to me personally. Just because the intentions behind a critique like this may seem anti-American or whatever doesn't mean we have to run in the complete opposite direction. We can chew and walk at the same time, which means to be pro-democracy and to also critique ourselves if necessary. This is not an authoritarian country. - Also the drone joke is in very poor taste. Even if they had a 100% hit rate without any innocent casualties which we know they unfortunately don't it would be wrong to make a joke like that. Yes, you can blame the terrorists if you want, but it still would trigger someone who has had a close family member accidentally die to something like that. I disliked your video over this, please think more about those you unintentionally can harm with such jokes. We can do better in communicating over this issue and we are not endearing those angry at America's foreign policy by making snarky jokes about drones.
EDIT: I will still say that I like your coverage usually and that I dislike Johnny Harris on a lot of his takes, sorry if I came off a bit negative here. That was not the intention.
I never heard of Johnny Harris and thought about skipping this because it's half an hour. Now I wish you'd do the whole 90 minutes. Great fact-filled commentary, thank you.
IMO Johnny Harris's videos are all this poorly researched and oriented around proving a specific political point for which he cherry picks info, talks to one or two biased parties, and then fills air with speculative commentary. He often preferences facts/statements that superficially 'blow your mind' but are generally not very insightful or informed. Like I just watched the first half of one of his videos where he REPEATEDLY emphasized that countries and their governments... ARE MADE UP by humans. It turns out things like President and lines on maps don't occur naturally without humans making them. MIND BLOWN.
I’m a researcher and historian with published work and time in the Senate. I respect what you do and I like your style, McBeth. That’s why I’m going to support what you do.
"The problem with Johnny Harris is that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about until he talks about something you know about"
Only enemies of the US want our military defunded. However the way military budgets are done does need to be modernized. We shouldn't punish divisions and units for not spending all of their budget each year.
Correct, only peacenik and/or Russian/Chinese asset want the democratic camp to have a weak or no military so they can do whatever they want.
... "Do you really think the air force pays $100k for a soap dispenser?"
I worked in the aerospace and defense industry for over 35 years. These people are always blaming the defense companies for their high prices, $10,000 hammer, $100k toilet etc etc. But try getting a specification for building some widget from the government and you will see really quickly why it costs so much. We built components for satellites and often the paperwork required to be sent with the component weighed much more than the component itself. There are so many requirements for material certifications, quality assurance, supply chain restrictions and so on that you usually had to have a dedicated staff to just verify we were compliant with the specification.
So in other words,
The paper trail, red tape, and other CHOICES the government made caused us to send orders of magnitude more money to build defense implements than they actually cost
Agreed. The first company I worked for would not do government work for this reason, and because the requirements put on the entire company for extra auditing, etc. This was a fully American owned private company, it just wasn't worth the effort. We were one of only two globally significant suppliers of our equipment, and engineering companies knew they would have to trick us to get a proposal for the equipment so they could fulfill their requirements to go out to multiple qualified bidders on the RFQ. They knew we wouldn't accept the order and they weren't going to write one to us, they'd find some reason to make sure we weren't going to win, even if we were low bid. I'd give the purchasers some grief and there were ways it could be made up later. All the little details of commercial enterprise in America, not good or bad, just part of it.
I am working in industry that make just small component for aerospace and military. Let me say, forget the burocracy. They are cases where you testing $2 components for month that cost tent of thousand of dollars to be sure that component will not fail iin critical application. If you sending space mission to mars that will cost hundreds of million of dollars you can not just send mechanic because some $2 components brake down. That just not possible. You just need to make that component extremely reliable and you do that by developing new processes and method the you used in many other products. One of the biggest open secret of US defense industry is that the money that it spend to that main contractors really go to thousands of subcontractors for R&D for development new components and processes as well manufacturing methods, and they are used in vast majority of product that we buying every day - look on you cell phone components. For hum the original research was done?
Really? Please defend the Boeing soap dispensers. Please explain the 2024 Pentagon audit that determined prices were inflated. This is not hyperbole, but fact. And there are a ton of examples.
@@JPage-fj7mb These people will just ignore record profits and bonuses given out to executives by defence contractors.
Yes it is more expensive to meet government specifications, but that is a minimal part of the costs here.
I finally did it, I got the Christmas sweater.
Thank-you for the none nonsense programing Ryan McBeth.
From Ottawa Canada, cheers mate.
Thank you!
“Let me start this video by describing how my entire career would sway me to be biased against the entire idea of defunding the military” the problem with this entire video is you operate with the fundamental belief that America “needs” to constantly grow its military
On the military industrial complex: the issue isn’t how big a company or its revenue is. The issue is how much it spends on lobbying and how well positioned it is to wield influence. These are all different issues.
In the video he proves with the numbers that tech companies have far more influence.
I get it, but it doesn’t mean the defense companies do not wield a lot of influence.
@@cadennorris960 The video just shows the disclosed spending on lobbying. Would you be surprised if the real number is much larger?
Have you seen his video on nationalism? Claiming only 2.5% of Italians spoke Italian in 1950? What's with all the Italian speaking Italian Americans, then? It took me 3 videos to figure out that he is a moron.
😮
Most Italians didn't speak Italian, but another language such as Piedmontese, Furlan, Veneto, Sardu, and of course what most Italian Americans spoke, Sicilianu or Calabrese. Some would call them dialects, but that would be incorrect. They are Italian languages, but not (Standard) Italian or dialects thereof.
@@igorjeeHey now, we deal in dunks here, not facts. To an American it’s all Italian, and the American perspective is infallible.
Whatever the reason for consolidation, consolidation still happened, and it's still a source of market manipulation and risk for the US military. You have a few points, but ignore the argument too many times to be considered an impartial commenter. For example, you ignore the dividends that politicians get from military contractors. Boeing, for example, has reoriented their entire operations towards the production of dividends, leading to poor quality. There is a huge problem with US military spending money in unproductive ways (i.e. funneling money in the form of stocks and dividends to shareholders) rather than actually producing equipment and services for the defense of the nation.
The worst part is that in the past when he has been called out like this, he has responded positively, pledging to do better. Yet every new video is the same level of very basic surface level knowledge and common misconception.
Basic corpo BS. Whenever you get called out for being shitty, just make vague appeasing noises and don't change anything
I would argue it's deliberate misinformation
you can't buy components that were available 20 years ago. It's ridiculous. You can't buy an 8-bit chip. Everything is 16-bit or 32-bit. Ridiculous
yes. i cant play my 20 year old computer games because the OS is 64 bit now. note: i am too smoothed brain to figure out how to use an emulator.
You can buy lots of different 8-bit chips. There's the NXP (formerly Motorola) HCS08, 8051-compatibles from dozens of different vendors, Microchip PIC and AVR, ST8, Zilog Z8, etc.
@enndubful but to use those, they have to be tested to ensure they are to the same standard as the original.
That isn't cheap.
@@bocadelcieloplaya3852 i like to think op was being sarcastic. that missile manufacturer is absolutely fleecing the taxpayers, and I would do the exact same thing if I were in their position lol. idk why ryan doesn't understand how capitalism works lol.
also emulators are pretty easy. there are plenty of videos online, documents, etc. you can even just directly play a lot of games in the web browser. i was playing banjo-kazooie in chrome the other day lol.
What you have here sounds right and checks out given the numbers you cited, but the phrasing used in saying that the top five Defense Companies make less than Proctor and Gamble sound like they are combined less. They are individually less of course, but saying that way seems to imply that there is some collective value in saying anything about the group beyond just that the top one is still smaller. Or did I just misunderstand this?
Ryan, I don't know why the DoD doesn't just hire you instead of them saying, "We're un-auditable; we don't know where the money goes."
Your 90 minute video to explain a 30 minute video of lies perfectly encapsulates why it's so much harder to correct BS than it is say it.
What 90 minute video?
@tacobruisedays the post you are responding to is not in good faith. He knows perfectly well that there is 90 minute video and why that is.
@@radicallyrethinkingrailwaysina Huh? I have literally no idea what you guys mean? Am I missing something?
@@uku4171 the fact that you were criticized for questioning how this 30 minute video is 90 minutes long to Harris’ 28 minute video is an important reminder of why you can never have a debate on the internet in good faith when people are busy changing basic facts like how long a video is. You can inform people about how and why military spending is done but you can’t ever win in a comment thread occupied by people looking for ways to call you a liar for wondering how 30 minutes is 90 minutes in some sort of silly 1984 scenario.
Dude, are trying to gaslight? Ryan's video is 30 minutes, not 90. Where's the missing 60 minutes? Is it for patrons only?
the stinger costing 10x more bc we gave all them all away is not a good defense of the industrial complex lmfao. his point still stands they are wasting money....
I stop when you said the Military Industrial Complex doesn't exist. I was in the airforce, I know it exist, in almost every country too. just because the company don't make bomb of money, doesn't mean that money is put in an incinerator and burned. people get paid, and you can see the number of ex-military that are working in these companies. of course they will pad their own future with those companies. just providing food for soldier, you have any idea how much money and job there are in it?
This, I feel like people discount the inherent value in being given a job or contract at all being most of the "bribe"
unfortunately for you, the majority of the net profits from those contracts actually goes to the board and c-level executives. most employees are paid pretty poorly compared to industry standard for things like software engineering, manufacturing and technical drawing.
To be fair procter and gamble makes a ton of shit, not only diapers. Its a huge company.
1991 stinger: $25,000
2024 Price adjusted for inflation: $58,000
Current price of stinger: 200k
Yeh it’s not the same guts but how tf is it 4x more expensive
It’s what happens when the infrastructure (and economy of scale) for a product essentially disappears. I recommend watching Perun’s videos on military procurement to learn more about it. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re selling it for a little bit extra.
It's old technology. You redevelop the missile with the parts that are available. Fit, form, and function is never the same. But to make the same missile, it has to be. 🤷♂️
It's because it wasn't a lie. Johnny is right lol. why would they NOT overcharge if the military needs them that badly? lol. i bet these guys are all up capitalism's ass, but man do they not get how any of it works lmao.
I would have guessed lobbying costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
A couple million is almost breathtakingly tiny.
why would they need to spend that much if they are the same people and are likely providing insider trading info? lol. if johnny doesn't know how military contracting works, this guy REALLY doesn't know how it works nor how lobbying works lol.
You are not the first person to point out Harris’ bullshit, but it needs an ongoing effort. Cheers
Defense contractor defends extreme military spending. Truly shocking. Also to reduce P&G down to "a company that sells diapers" is truly ridiculous.
So funny - he cries about JH's comparison between US military R&D and Morocco's GDP. And then makes a similar comparison between P&G (calls them only a diaper company lol) and the Congo's GDP. I thought he was against comparing countries with institutions lol.
He lies in every video. Every video where I had some knowledge I noticed he was clearly manipulating the facts. Dude lies, intentionally.
Maybe…but I’ve always pegged him as incompetent and lazy.
@@sulblazer so his writers are the ones intentionally lying & Johnny Harris is too lazy to care & too incompetent to notice or doing anything about it
You can't deny that the defense industry has its fair share of corruption.
You need to fight against that. There's no way around it.
And you can't deny that the US spends what some would argue is an unreasonable amount of money on defense.
However, the defense industry as a whole can never be as efficient and cheap as other private sectors. It literally can't happen.
It's one of those sectors that is indispensable for a country's existence. That means you can't afford your defense contractors to be uncompetitive.
That means you have to prop them up, even when doing so doesn't make much sense in a business or efficient spending sense, because you can't afford them to go out of business. That means paying a lot of money for things that don't necessarily deserve their price tag.
Add in a mountain of bureaucracy and opaqueness that is required due to the nature of the business, and you've got the perfect recipe for things costing too much and a lot of room for corruption to roam free.
public sector can and often is MUCH more efficient compared to private sector lol. take schools (or prisons) for example. market failures are a thing.
Sure but Johnny didn't show or prove any of that.
@@soccerguy2433 he did lol. the revolving door is real and obvious. it's why their lobbying amount is so low; they can just buy stock right before a conflict. that stinger missile's price is also not accounted for by resurrecting manufacturing of its parts. it's like dozens of times more expensive than it would be. if the military needs them that badly, the contractor would be morons to not fleece them for it lol. it's just basic (crony) capitalism.
@@snowballeffect7812 It really isn't. Exceptions do not disprove the rule.
That's why capitalism (within reasonable limits) works in the long run and state controlled economies don't.
The logic behind using GDP as a metric for determining how much should be spent is a red herring. It's like comparing the spending between the US and Somalia on military spending even if Somalia spent 100% of their GDP on military it would be insignificant in comparison to the US. The fact that the US spends more than all of our competition combined despite not having anywhere near the population as those combined countries. A better metric would be how much do we spend per person on defense. That is if you believe that it truly about defense spending and not about global influence.
Thank you for putting this video together. It provides much-needed context on these topics and has significantly impacted my trust in Johnny Harris. I do have a couple of comments: 1) I find the comparison of dollar amounts to Morocco's GDP unhelpful-it feels sensationalist and lacks context-but it isn’t technically a lie. 2) You rightly examine military spending as a percentage of GDP, but I think you missed an important point: compared to other advanced economies not engaged in active wars, the U.S. spends about 1.5x. The UK and France are the most relevant comparisons here. U.S. military spending is naturally higher because, unlike most countries, it supports a global military presence to defend allies and project power-an inherently costly endeavor. Thanks again!
Consolidation has happened in nearly every American Industry. To the detriment of citizens and workers in my opinion.
yes, we need to unionize, esp those MIC contractors' employees. they get paid 50% industry standard cuz they're based in Alabama and such. quite a ripoff.
Now just wait a sec. Not saying you’re lying out your arse, but saying that Proctor & Gamble is a company that makes diapers is as bad of a lie of omission as Johnny Harris. They have like 30+ brands that make a lot more than diapers.