Defending Rome's Borders
By Connor and Liam
What was the problem in Rome?
The Romans spent too little money on paying the troops so they had worse weapons and cheaper weaker soldiers. Many Romans lost all of their desire to fight for Rome because they weren’t being paid enough and they were angry with parts of Roman government. Christians refused to fight for Rome along with the richer citizens and necessities in Rome like chefs bakers etc.. The Roman government thus had to use Barbarians for the army and made the army less disciplined. This affected the way they trained and fought and the Roman army became little more than a Barbarian army. This opened up the opportunity for the Barbarians to attack a weaker army and thus led to the collapse of the empire.
What is similar here in the United States?
In the US we spend $718 billion per year on military. In the past 13 years the military budget has gone up by 114%, but we are now starting to cut down on the costs of the military, which will in turn weaken it. We need to keep up this high level of spending on military to make sure we don’t weaken our military to attackers. This graph shows how much the military spending is in the U.S compared to the rest of the world's largest militaries.
Problems with not spending as much on the military
It could open up our country to attacks from foreign countries
We would fall behind in military power and technology like newer weapons
We could in turn ignore large issues in the world because we don’t have the weapons or manpower to fight or solve the conflicts.
The graph above shows how the U.S military spending is now decreasing and is projected to decrease to its lowest levels since before Wold War 2
How can we not follow the same path of Rome?
Although the U.S spends lots of money already, we need to make sure that we don’t cut back so much that we start to lose our presence in the world. We also want to make sure that we keep a relatively large sized military during peacetime so we don’t lose our grip but we aren’t threatening other countries. Since Rome didn’t spend very much money on military, they lost their grip defending their borders which in turn led to the collapse of the Empire. In the U.S, we need to have a strong military presence so we can keep our power in the world.