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KaTaLy5t_619 t1_j1z7u55 wrote

I'd love to see a breakdown of how much of the stated figures actually make their way through to defence spending. Case in point being Russia and those "1.5 million military uniforms" they had bought and stored away that ended up not existing.

I feel like there has to be some level of corruption or "palm greasing" that goes on everywhere, but based on evidence seen this year during the war in Ukraine, Russia must be number 1 on the chart of "allegedly spent on defence but actually bought a yacht for some dude instead".

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BigBayesian t1_j23k7xt wrote

It’d be great if there were some good way to measure corruption and put it into the graph. But I suspect that’d be hard. It might also be divisive - if a US senator holds up a defense appropriations bill until some spending for their district is added, is that corruption? I suspect you can find conflicting, earnest, legitimate answers to that question.

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KaTaLy5t_619 t1_j23m4pu wrote

Very true. It's probably impossible to ever know for sure the true level of actual corruption. What might be easier to find is what proportion of the budget actually made it through to nee hardware or training, although I'm sure there's plenty of creative accounting that can be done to disappear a couple of billion pretty easily.

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