You realize that the fiction of a coherent "Military Industrial Complex" has been debunked several times right? One by the General Accounting Office showed that military contractors actually had higher profits in peacetime than wartime because they got money for 'research' and didn't have to actually produce any product.
Not that I necessarily buy in to the idea of "a coherent Military-Industrial Complex", but this doesn't really debunk much. It seems to me that peacetime profits for military contractors are dependent on the assumption that there's going to be wartime usage of the research they're doing in the short- to medium-term. Surely if we went a significant period without any military engagements, there would be far less of a push to fund the research of military contractors (I know that military research tends to make it into the consumer sphere and make us all better off, but that's definitely not what motivates the funding).
Except we don't live in that fantasy world. In reality there always is, and always has been, war looming on the horizon. Maybe we'll someday achieve a utopian, Star Trek like existence, but I don't imagine it will be anytime soon.
You misunderstand my comment. I'm not talking about a world in which war doesn't exist, but one in which a given country doesn't have constant military engagement. There's no need to think about whether this is possible, because there are plenty of countries for whom this is already true. Obviously many of these countries (Europe et al) are able to do this in large part _because_ of the US military, so I'm not suggesting that it's as simple as "we should stop having military engagements entirely". It's naive to think that we don't also reap benefits from being in a position of what's essentially military hegemony. But this doesn't really debunk the theory one might have about industry's role in ensuring that the US stays in this position.
EDIT to add: The binary way you're looking at it is also way off from reality; It seems self-evident that the more often one has military engagements, the easier it is to convince those in charge that more money should flow to military expenditures (which includes peacetime research). It's not the simple case of "constant war = military spending" vs "utopia = no military spending" that you're describing.
It's not a matter of knowing that a specific war is coming, it's a matter of preparing for what may come. Wars (or, at least, situations which require military intervention) happen all of the time. As such, we will always be preparing for the next one.
The point is that humans are always fighting with one another. Until that stops there will always be a war looming.
That's cute that you think there is an inherent existential threat imposed by the rest of the world that wasn't deliberately exacerbated by those interests who stand to profit from such conflict.
Well I'm flattered that you think I'm cute, but I'm not sure where you pulled any of the other nonsense you wrote from (I have an idea). I never made any of the arguments that you claim I have.
If you read the parent, he doesn't buy the debunking of the industrial military complex because, in a theoretical world where war is not a common occurrence, the conclusion doesn't hold water. Well, that's nice, but in the real world, war happens. A lot. It always has and it still does.
The reason for this is irrelevant. You talk about war being manufactured for personal gain (with no proof I would add, but whatever). True or not, it's irrelevant. We're talking about human nature here. Do you really think a time will come in which everyone is moral and good and wars cease to occur?
If you do then you believe that we will somehow alter whatever it is that brings people like this into existence. I hope you're right, but for now you're living in a fairy tale. I prefer to deal with reality as it is, not what I wish it were.
I didn't say it is coherent. Systems sometimes seem coherent, which feeds simplistic conspiracy theories (also serve as a straw man counter-argument). In reality complex systems are decentralized but often are evolving according to some rules. Those rules make it seem as it is a coherent large system. Think of an ant hill, a beehive, how large organizations are structured bureaucratically.
Chomsky, for example, analyses this in respect to the media. Large media ends up acting in sync with government's propaganda because there are set of constraints and incentive s built in. From outside they often act _as if_ they are centrally controlled by a single government party.
You know what would help "debunk" such a thing; if there was a site where every single investment made by any member of congress was required to be listed.
That sounds extremely unlikely. Most research projects don't get hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, while a single F-22 costs upwards of $150 million.
The total program cost of the F22 is $66 billion. On a Pentagon spending request site they put the per unit cost as $354 million if you include R&D and procurement costs. So maybe it's more likely than you might think.
