... with a military budget that exceeds the combined total of all other countries...
In one of the first comments received on this site, it went like this:
It is still about equal to the defense spending of the rest of the nations combined, and eight times the amount of the country with the next highest military budget (China).
Those are just two of the dozens of examples I've seen.
The way the meme is presented it is an ignoratio elenchi ( ignorance of refutation), more commonly referred to as a "Red Herring" fallacy (aka Smoke Screen, Wild Goose Chase, etc.).
Its definition is:
The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the hounds off the scent. Thus, a "red herring" argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy. This frequently occurs during debates when there is an at least implicit topic, yet it is easy to lose track of it. By extension, it applies to any argument in which the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion.
Introducing new, relevant information into a discussion is not a Red Herring. Introducing information with the intention of distracting the original thesis is. A Red Herring is in the category of distraction fallacies.
The meme could be classified, loosely, as an appeal to emotion as it is a bomb dropped to make someone sympathetic to the other points being made by the critic of the original argument.
It is common for irrelevant comparisons like this to be brought into discussions, either with the intent to distract, or more innocently by people who are not students of logic.
In discussions of man-made global warming or pollution control, it is common to see someone make the claim that "the U.S. uses 25% of the world's energy resources." While that statistic may be correct, its corollary is necessary for relevance, i.e., "yes, and the U.S. produces 33% of the world's goods." While we use more of energy than any other nation, we use it more efficiently and effectively than any other nation. With the outcome comparison it is easy to dismiss the distraction of that argument. Refuting that claim by suggesting that "Americans are fatter than any other nation, so they can't be more productive and efficient" would do nothing to provide meaningful context to the discussion.
It is not relevent to discuss what the U.S. military budget is in comparison to 10 other countries, or all (depending on which version of the meme is used). What is relevent to the discussion is how much is the right amount, or how much we should be spending to achieve our objectives and goals with respect to national and international security.
It is possible to refute the claim by bringing in additional information, such as the facts that Germany and Japan are prohibited (by treaties signed after WWII) from having certain types of military capabilities, and the U.S. provides the missing capabilities for them, on their behalf. The world powers decided after WWII that some nations were incapable of showing restraint with respect to military capabilities, so it was in the best interest of the world for it to be denied to them, while still allowing them to have the protection that such military capabilities would provide.
Including the above, however, will enable another type of distraction to occur (playing to the hand of the distracter) by branching that further to discuss if that is something the U.S. should continue to do, or was appropriate for the U.S. to do at any time.
It doesn't matter, for the purposes of pointing out the fallacious nature of introducing the statistic if it is, in fact, correct. Depending how you select the countries to sum from the list of military expenditures by country, you can taint the data to present it any way you want (the U.S. is, for example, the largest contributor to the U.N. and U.N. Peacekeeping forces and NATO). If you include the amount the U.S. contributes to those efforts, the amount the U.S. spends will be higher. Levels of military spending can also be explored by looking at the data in comparison to its spending as a percent of GDP.
Regardless, getting into the above does exactly what the Red Herring is intending to do: Redirect the discussion away from the central thesis.
Conspiracy or Not
It is not uncommon for people to see a discussion point and repeat it, without it being motivated by conspiracy. It could simply be a coincidence that this one keeps popping up; however, with the recent revelations about JournoList and the awareness that there were large numbers of individuals paid to distract political discussions during the presidential election, it is not so easy to dismiss these types of repeating memes as conspiracies of some stripe. This, as a conspiracy, cannot be dismissed out of hand, either as a conspiracy of distraction by intended conspirators or by useful idiots.
Relevancy
How much the U.S. spends on its military, in comparison to other countries in the world, has no relevance to how much we should be spending. It is also irrelevant to whether water-boarding is torture, if man-made global warming is a fact, if our military is well-funded, or if America is or is not imperialistic in its behavior.
Keep your eyes and ears open for this meme and avoid being caught by its tentacles.
"Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought."
- Milan Kundera, “The Brilliant Ally of His Own Gravediggers,” Part 3, Immortality (1991).
Note: The SIPRI data, which is used to produce the tables shown on Wikipedia is nonsense. The definition of what is included in the table includes the weasel phrase, "Where possible."
In the list of what should be excepted from the totals it includes: civil defence, current expenditure for previous military activities, veterans benefits, demobilization, conversion of arms production facilities, and destruction of weapons.
The figure shown for the U.S. includes all or most of the above. Either the SIPRI database administrators do not now how to access the U.S. military budget data (PDF), English is not their first language (so they can't properly interpret what our budget data means and how to exclude their exclusion categories from the U.S. data because the line items include excepted items), or they are intentionally keying data into the database with the knowledge that their list of exceptions is ignored for the U.S.
It took me all of five minutes to look at the data on which these claims are made to determine it is specious. Having access to a fact is not the same as validating it as truthful.
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