Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of military research could be something useful, but that money would go a lot further if we just went for the useful thing immediately. The F35 is a good example. Whatever technology gains came out of that project are likely useful in general, but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.
Indeed. Some people defend war spending by saying that it leads to, say, medial advances. Seems to me that you can fund medical research without spending a trillion dollars sending humans around the planet, causing another trillion in infrastructure damage, air-conditioning tents in a desert, blowing limbs off the aforementioned humans, flying them home and then still spending the money on the research to fix them (and in the US especially, then also denying these hard-won fruits of this whole taxpayer-funded endeavour to the taxpayers).
The point of military spending is to prevent war by creating a strong deterrent that encourages diplomacy. It’s not to start wars, that’s why it’s called defense spending. (I’m not arguing the US always does this right.)
The continental united states is surrounded by two friendly neighbors that are not a threat to us. We are separated from our nearest peer adversaries by thousands of miles of ocean, and their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.
We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
> their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.
I mean, Russia invades and China taunts its neighbors pretty regularly, so clearly their military is focused on more than defense from the US (as if we have any interest in an offensive war against them in the first place). The US military keeps those countries in check, so of course they focus on how they can “defend” against our military. The extent to which Russia and China are scheming against the US military is the extent to which they aren’t invading their neighbors, which is precisely the value the US military provides, and indeed that Russia is invading Ukraine is a failure of the US government to respond firmly to previous invasions (no, not direct military conflict with Russia).
The idea that the US or the world can enjoy meaningful peace while withdrawing from the global theater is dangerously naive. There’s no world in which we pull back without oppressive dictatorships rushing to fill the void.
It's not our 'job' to be the world police. We've been effectively subsidizing social spending in LATAM and europe for decades now. Other countries would simply have to increase their defense spending as necessary to keep themselves safe.
I don't think there is any role for the US military beyond defending US soil. I'm tired of propping up our bloated military industrial complex on the premise that we are solely responsible for world peace.
I doubt you'll find anyone who believes that it's ideal that the US is solely or primarily responsible for world peace, but it is an important role that we play. Further, not only is it morally reprehensible to allow the world to fall into chaos on the basis that "we ought not have to" as we retreat within our own borders, but it violates our own self-interest--as our partners fall, we become weaker economically and militarily, which leaves us vulnerable to attack.
A shared responsibility for world peace probably looks more like "more involvement from our NATO partners" (which we're actually beginning to see now that Europe is waking up to the fact that their peace is a property of NATO protection rather than some foregone conclusion). It decidedly doesn't look like the US dramatically shrinking defense spending (the US only spends 3% of its GDP on defense and that's on track to fall to 2.7% by the end of the decade), but more likely having our partners increase their own contributions and involvement.
Last I saw we spend 3.7% of our gdp on defense, and most of our allies are spending like half that much. Must be nice to spend on your populace while you rely on uncle sam to have your back.
I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.
Europe disarmed massively after WW2, understandable if you look at scale of the damage that was done. That left the US as the bouncer (street name: NATO) for the West, an arrangement that's probably by and large worked, some questionable misadventures on foreign shores notwithstanding. WW2 is no longer relevant and Europe should rearm and share the defense burden, even Germany. Ideally there'd be no defense burden at all, and a defense budget of $0, but if you neglect it then, even in enlightened 2022, you get raped and pillaged c.f. Ukraine.
I hope you are prepared for many more russian and/or china backed regimes in africa/se asia. This would put any ressource extraction/trade from these regions in the hands of Putin/Xi.
Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.
If it doesn't happen to US citizens on US soil, it's not our place to directly intervene with boots on the ground. We can manage international relations with diplomacy and trade.
> Our military has nothing to do with the strength of the dollar. That is totally reliant on the strength of our economy.
The strength of the dollar is all about beating whoever disagrees with its role as the oil exchange currency to submission, because that is its current base for its demand. Libya was not invaded because the West suddenly remembered that Kandafi is a dictator. Iraq was not invaded because suddenly WMD were found (did they ever find another tale to cover their reasons?), Syria was not made into anarchy because the West wanted the Syrian people to be free. They all had one common point near the time of invasion. So yes the military does play a big role.
That doesn't work when you have a belligerent who needs to get itself into conflicts every 15 years to keep its experience levels up and foment conflict abroad in the "off season" to support its MIC.
Considering how frequently we put our weapons of war to use ruining the lives of poor people around the world I would say that theory has been disproved. The US is virtually always at war.
What do people think happens if the US withdraws from the global theater and doesn’t maintain its military capabilities? Do we really think that Russia or China would settle for regional skirmishes, and the world would be at peace? The US is very often at war, but there are greater evils than the US bombing ISIS even with the commensurate civilian casualties (hint: few other military powers are so scrupulous about civilian casualties).
You might want to research the contacts, support, decisions and occurrences regarding the US administration and ISIS. And that's just regarding an organization you mentioned. We would lose count if we started listing the countries the US willingly destroyed in cold blood.
I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime as "peace spending" not "war spending".
Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine, at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait), some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries have enough military might during peacetime to make would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
Peace is relative. The US has not had war on its own territory since the Civil War, so the civilian population has experienced peace for over 150 years.
During WW1 and especially WW2, the US military was employed to nearly maximum capacity, in other words, 1945 was the last time the military was in a state of all-out war.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the military was partially committed to the wars, maybe around 25% of 1945's commitment. I would label these limited wars.
The invasion phases of the two Iraqi wars as well as the invasion phase in Afghanistan saw similar levels of mobilization, but these were over so quickly they would be more like skirmishes.
And for the rest, I would label them as little more than policing of occupied territories.
(All of the above from the US perspective, from the perspective of the adversary, several of the above were total wars.)
If you look at the death toll, WW2 cost 0.4% of the US population at the time. The Vietnam and Korean wars cost less than 0.1% of the population each, and the rest hardly register.
Compare that to the 5%-20% death toll of many European countries during WW2, and similar numbers for numerous other wars through history, and you get a perspective of how peaceful the US has been since the Civil War.
> but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.
Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
Agreed. There’s no way the government in the 80s would have invested in the Internet without a defense pretext, for example, because no one understood the potential it would unlock. Similarly, there would be virtually no space exploration or satellites (or any of the other significant advancements) apart from the space race.
That the Internet exists directly refutes what looks like common reasoning. It never would have happened without DARPA (because telecoms never would have let it happen).
Many networks were being developed in parallel, so I am not sure how you can say that the idea of interconnecting them would never have come up. And most of the initial network designs (including ARPANET btw) were very much inspired by a design coming from the NPL in the UK (a metrology institute.. very much not military).
So what you meant to say was that without basic research institutes like NPL or CERN the internet as we know it today would not exist.
However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around.
Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds.
So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different.
And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites).
This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.
That's a fair point; there's something to be said for novel technology being developed by industries/organizations adjacent to but not directly involved in the industry of that technology. This seems to tend to yield better results than funding the industry directly.
My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network.
Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
You make a great point about "adjacent" players. However, in the case of the military, it's even moreso. . .
Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war!
Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military.
I think it’s just lack of imagination—no one in the 80s could see what the Internet could become—it would have been a huge gamble with little predictable value (of course, we have the benefit of hindsight).
You act like the basic research that darpa funded could not have been otherwise funded by a nation that didn't spend a large chunk of its budget on military spending.
I’m also having a hard time imagining some hypothetical peaceful country spending billions on a computer network without the benefit of hindsight regarding its potential value. In other words, without knowing the commercial, social, etc potential of the Internet in advance and without a military pretext, what country would have committed to spending on its development?
I don't know if you've ever met any ... aircraft metallurgists, for example, but holy poops are they motivated by doing anything awesome with advanced alloys.
The internet being a byproduct of defense spending means that the ROI of defense spending is probably many years ahead considering where it put the U.S. from a global software dominance standpoint.
It’s not popular to talk positively about the F35 yet. You need to pretend that the US’s military spending is entirely negative and the world would be better off if it had zero standing army.
How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?
I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
You seem a little negative towards astronomy for an amateur astronomer. Knowing that Pluto is there, or other galaxies exist has little use in terms of utility, but we still want to know. The images and data output by the JWST might be of little use to scientists in 100 or 1000 years, but that data will still spark the next round of research that will put them in the more advanced position they find themselves in.
I love knowing this stuff, and getting to see the faint light that comes to us from so far away, and so long ago. I still think it's almost totally useless.
I was trying to highlight the difference between being useful and being valuable. Your stargazing might not be particularly useful but it's very valuable, because you enjoy it and because you're awed by what you see. Trying to find it useful or useless doesn't need to come in to it.
> How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?
What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe like the James Webb.
A stockpile of tanks, fighter planes, and ICMBs deters a whole lot of aggression without being used. I think people who have only ever known relative global stability don’t appreciate what it will look like if the US dramatically reduces its military capability and oppressive dictatorships rush to fill the void.
Laughs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, Pakistan, and all the military juntas instigated by the US in Latin America. US has no problem with oppressive dictatorships as long as they cooperate.
It would have taken much longer to come about, if it had happened at all. International efforts are like cartels which agree that they'll share any innovations, thus stunting progress (by removing the incentive to improve).
Undoubtedly. But I'm glad my own country got to at least play a small part, which of course we had to make a movie about (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish).
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of the F-35 was to keep the engineering firms sort of perpetually in a war-ready state and keep the engineer pipeline going strong.
