Benefits and Costs
The obvious benefit to a country in maintaining armed forces is in providing protection from foreign threats and from internal conflict. In recent decades armed forces personnel have also been used as emergency civil support roles in post-disaster situations. On the other hand, they may also harm a society by engaging in counter-productive (or merely unsuccessful) warfare. Expenditure on science and technology to develop weapons and systems sometimes produces side benefits, although some claim that greater benefits could come from targeting the money directly.
See also: Deterrence theoryRead more about this topic: Armed Forces
Famous quotes containing the words benefits and/or costs:
“It is too late in the century for women who have received the benefits of co-education in schools and colleges, and who bear their full share in the world’s work, not to care who make the laws, who expound and who administer them.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what’s come to pass,
They won’t lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that’s said.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)