[solistice]

The sum of European defense spending is about as high as that of the US, but it's defense efficiency is at about 10% of that of the US due to duplicate hardware and parallel organisational structures.(I went to a Model UN Conference a couple of years ago, and our comitee wrote a resolution on establishing an Unified European Defense Force, and those numbers came up somewhere in my preliminary research, but I'm too lazy to dig them up again). What's intresting is that there are Community Medical Centers in the US, which offer the same medical procedures as regular hospitals, by the same doctors which are paid the same wage ,for 2,5k $ instead of 25k$ afaik. But then they don't charge 25$ for a disposable syringe that cost 50 cent to buy and 5 cent to produce.