Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, but almost always also a fight to maintain spheres of influence. This was certainly true for the Vietnam war, where above all a communist Indonesia had to be avoided, but also obviously for any conflict in the Middle east.
What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.
You've hit on it in a nutshell, I think.
The entire War on Terror is predicated upon the idea that a) we must ferret out and neutralize threats before they manifest and b) we must occupy regions which may generate threats.
Those two policies directly manifest in the development of advanced surveillance and techniques of oppression. Even more sickeningly, there is no way of proving it wrong: if something bad happens, the answer is to increase efforts; and if nothing bad happens, the answer is not to cutback the defenses that presumably prevented that nothing.
Usually, I would say that we just have to wait for some sort of wake up call, something the US government fucks up so incredibly that anything involving surveillance of an innocent populace is a poison pill.
But we've already had the Snowden leaks, and if that wasn't a wake up call, I don't know what else could be.
The next logical step is death squads, drone surveillance (and strikes?) and kidnappings on US soil, not just abroad. I hope it won't come to that, but I fear it will. Maybe not until 2050 or so, though.
Judging by current operations abroad, and historic evidence, like who and how Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) (Nee School of Americas) have been training and for what, things like COINTELPRO -- things are looking grim.
[ed: not to mention the lack of consequences from Snowden and the CIA torture report -- there doesn't appear to be even a thin veneer of acountability left.]
You aren't quite hitting the nail on the head. It's not about funneling money into the economy, it's about manipulating the systems of governance to make theft of public resources and money tenable. It's the same reason that we have predictable "unpredictable" "bubbles" in the economy and it is why we start wards who's sole purpose is justification to steal public money for private gains. In many ways, there is even a disincentive to winning a war or military conflict at all. Imagine if we had responded to the 9/11 attacks in a smart manner; it would have cost maybe upper double digit millions of dollars to apprehend or kill OBL, but going into Afghanistan like buffoon cost us no less than $1,000,000,000,000.00 in direct expenditures and probably about another trillion in opportunity cost and indirect costs.
THAT's the name of the game. Stealing public money to enrich private individuals. As long as there is an incentive to manipulate America into blowing our money and efforts on military boondoggles, we will do exactly that.
The "wars" and the militarism is essentially just a tool to extract ever more money from the government, the economy, and tax payers in order to funnel them to wards the power brokers.
It's a kind of scam similar to a multilevel marketing scheme, which is quite similar to a run of the mill ponzi scam and quite similar to a simple protection racket. In case you don't know what a con job is, it is shorthand for "confidence trick", a type of scam where fostered confidence is manipulated in order to gain unfettered access to the direct target of the scheme, which is usually money.
In the case of war, the multilevel marketing scheme con job is all about fostering confidence in the military protecting us and our children from all kinds of bad guys. The problem though, as the military services sector and America quickly realized after the fall of the Soviet Union, is that you cannot justify your target handing over their earnings and writing over their assets if there is nothing to be scared and the bad guy just keeled over. If you remember or were paying attention during the 90s, you will recall that beyond the almost desperate nature of agitation to attack Iraq and Saddam (which also has its own illustrious history of lies and false flag type incidents), there was serious angst about how our military would justify unjustifiable expenditure into the foreseeable future. There was serious identity crisis in the late 90s military services sector. 9/11 was the like a huge birthday cake with all the icing already on top of it they could have ever wished for and the Al Qaeda colluding buffoons in the White House at the time were just the stripper jumping out of the cake.
The scary thing about it is that our government and our wealthy and out military services sector essentially dropped a gasoline bladder on a camp fire, instead of covering it with dirt and water; but will they be able to tame the demons they have let out and even if they can, will it not have contributed to draining our attention and resources from developing and building our own society to compete in the future instead of being mired in battles with primitive mindsets.
Personally, I think it will once be written that the USA was a short lived power that succumbed to internal saboteurs that drove the USA off a cliff for selfish greed and allowed it to be overtaken by the more focused and deliberate China. We have always been our own worst enemy.
Were does the US military budget money get spent? A small portion goes on wages, but every soldier needs equipment, food, and requires infrastructure. This is mostly provided by private companies. "Defence" companies are in the top lobbyists by expenditure, at about $200M each per year. They lobby hard to get the lucrative contracts to provide all the above and more (e.g. the F-35 program).
Who pays for all this? The government of course. And where does the government get its money? The tax payers. I.e. the public.
So the reasoning goes that the industrial military complex exists to transfer money from the public, via the government, to private companies.
Actual expenses in 2012 show that military pay and benefits accounts for 34.6% of the DoD budget, with total pay and benefits (including civilian) accounting for 47.8%. According to a CBO report I read in 2010, the growth in personnel costs for the military was one of the biggest concerns for long term budget planning. The vast majority of the military servicemen costs are due to the cost of providing healthcare, because the military isn't exempt or immune to the cost growth experienced in that sector.
As an additional aside, expected outlays for the post-9/11 GI bill are much higher than initial estimates because the cost of college has grown so much and the benefits are transferrable.
Given your definition of "spending other people's money on something that doesn't benefit them or their [idealized notions of] society", this fits far more in the camp of conservative wordplay. Liberals--at least according to the US conservative political narrative--love to "steal" other people's money to spend it on something that doesn't benefit them directly. Or so the conservatives charge. It is rare--if even that frequently--to hear American liberals refer to the spending of public money as "theft" in public discourse.
But there's part of it that goes back to the economy. Think the Internet, GPS, early Silicon Valley and early Texas tech hubs. Of course, that was privatized and state sponsored research turned into cash cows for the private sector. Even some big names like Google and Facebook had seed money from state-related groups.
It's got to lie in creating consequences and re-associating incentives. As long as war makes people rich, it will be perpetuated and we will squander money that could have led us to far better outcomes.
With wealth and income disparity becoming so hugely imbalanced, I expect things to only get worse though. Wealth and income disparity only exasperates the motivation to manipulating the system to thrust us into war and military spending, it's a positive feedback loop. Unfortunately, positive feedback loops are rarely, without deliberate action, halted prior to leading to disaster.
Who are generally required by law to spend most of those dollars on American salaries and American-made products. Thus funneling them into the economy.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his "Chance for Peace" speech
No one said it was a good or efficient jobs and stimulus program. That however doesn't change the fact that it is a jobs and stimulus program. This is most evident when looking at local politicians when a specific program is potentially being shutdown. They will fight tooth and nail regardless of the strategic necessity of the program just so they can keep the local jobs and money that that program provides.
A certain pedantry forces me to point out: Listening to the speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNbfa1QyYg, I find there are two discrepancies from this transcript: "fighter" should read "fighter plane", and "This, I repeat, is" should read "This is, I repeat,".
My apologies. At last, the record is set straight!
Yes, that's why a huge proportion of US gov't expenditures are for entitlements. If we're trying our best not to hand out money to citizens, we're doing a pretty bad job.
In general, I agree, but for every destroyer built, how many dock workers wound up being able to buy one of those houses with their salary? It offsets the problem, at least somewhat.
That doesn't change the calculus because the offset applies equally to both sides. Suppose you had paid the workers the same amount to build schools instead. They would still be able to buy houses with their salaries, but now there would also be a bunch of nice new schools.
I think the problem is we need to reach world stability. Look at Europe and Japan --economies which had invested relatively little into militaries, they are both reconsidering their previous position due to mainly two factors, the US disengaging, relatively speaking, and a perceived (and by perceived i don't mean imagined) threat from strengthening militaries in Russia and China, which given Europe and Japans previous dependence on the US left them in a era position to respond to growing threats.
This hits on honestly the only regret I have with the recent military history of the US. I don't mind that we spend $150 million on "warp speed death machines". I do mind that we spend some of that in the name of protecting countries which are perfectly capable of protecting themselves. Assisting allied forces with our own is fine; replacing them is not.
Sure, but it's hard to argue that it is a better result than if you paid those same dock workers for building schools, out of that same government money, or if instead of a destroyer they were housing a fleet of cargo ships used for commerce. In the best possible case, seeing military spending as economic stimulus amounts to "we will use the fear our citizens have of other people to institute backdoor and inefficient redistribution and science research programs; because we failed at getting them to consent to fund those same goals directly out of care for others."
Of course, this assumes economic stimulus is really the main reason for military spending, which is probably not how the people in charge of these programs see it.
If you really want to blow your mind/weep uncontrollably a little bit of math is just the ticket.
The F-22 costs $150,000,000 per plane [1]. The price of a bushel of wheat is $6.52 [2]. This means that a single F-22 costs ~23,006,134 bushels of wheat.
A bushel of wheat can produce ~100 loaves of bread weighing 1.5lbs each [3], meaning that each F-22 costs ~2,300,613,496 loaves of bread.
The US military has built 187 F-22 planes [1], meaning that it has exchanged the ability to create 430,214,723,926 loaves of bread for a warp speed death machine. Put another way, the US military could provide a loaf of bread to every man, woman, and child on this planet(!) once per week for 62 weeks for the same price as its fleet of F-22s.
The next time someone talks about world hunger as some sort of intractable problem, just remember that we are actively choosing to allow people to starve and die in order to build ever more efficient death machines.
-The cost to produce a loaf of bread is $0 above the raw wheat cost
-The cost to distribute a loaf of bread to all of humanity is $0
-A loaf of bread is sufficient to healthily sustain a starving person
I mean yeah, even if the final number was 20% of your "math", it would be a lot of bread. But the answer to world hunger isn't "let's take all the F-22 money and use it to make bread!"
63 weeks is a little over a year. Considering the exponential population growth in the developing world, this number would be already smaller next year.
I am not particularly huge fan of military development, but it would at least advance mankind, just giving away free bread will only move it closer to the doom.
I understand the point you're trying to make but unfortunately it isn't an accurate comparison. However, I do think you've got something here because I question whether building F-22s at $150mil per plane plus the costs of armament exceeds the cost of feeding and arming the populaces as well as training them to defend themselves against groups like the Taliban and ISIS. I would also add in the nominal (it isn't expensive to educate people) cost of education on religions and basic human rights to help prevent the spread of radicalization.
I'd wager that it is far less expensive to do this than to build planes to attack an enemy where the costs of these planes is not conducive at all to the value of destroying this enemy and obliterating any progress towards paying off our debt.
Thank you for the reply. Although my last sentence was probably unnecessarily combative, I hope that people reading this don't get hung up on that, how exact the math is, or how much nutrition a loaf of bread can truly provide. I mean I just looked at the cost of building the active fleet. Wikipedia estimates the total costs of the program as being roughly 4x that cost, so even taking into account the costs of a loaf of bread beyond wheat I bet that feeding the planet (with bread) for a year is still pretty close to the cost of the program.
You got what I was hoping people would take away, which is that we look at groups around the world being radicalized, turning to oppressive religion and wonder "why? what makes them do that?", and maybe one piece of the puzzle would be asking what sort of reaction these people would have if we gave everyone in their nation food for a year instead of taking a large portion of the world's total resources and expending it on war machines which we then use in their homeland.
I get your intent, but there's also the political problem in a democracy.
How hard is it to convince a majority of people that buying more death machines is a good use of their money?
Now how hard to convince a majority that feeding the world is a good use?
Now how hard to convince them that building schools is a good use?
I'll just remark that the answer to that last is why Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban in the first place (after the warlords the US supported bickered amongst each other for a while).
That does require that F-22 fighters are fungible with wheat production. It's possible that at the margin wheat productivity will be far less than the average price of wheat -- that is, that you'll have less productivity.
But yes, it's a tremendous expenditure of treasury.
Paddy rice is a substantially higher labor crop than mechanization-friendly wheat production per calorie, and China eats about as much wheat as it does rice; It grows even more maize, but this is mostly as feed.
Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically.
On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access.
And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political.
From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people.
There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place.
In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).
You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades.
The F-22 is likely one amazing airplane.
If we in the US don't need the F-22, then
it's way too expensive. If we do need it,
then it's maybe quite cheap.
In a sense, we can suspect that, if the F-22
is never used, then maybe it has, thus, done
its best possible work -- would be enemies
were afraid to attack us where the F-22 could
ruin their attack.
Could a plane far ahead of its candidate
opponents do that well at avoiding a war?
Under some fairly realistic circumstances, yes.
Suppose for the sake of the argument, we assume
that the US should have fought Gulf War I
(I tend to think so, e.g., Kuwait was invaded
and Saudi Arabia was next on Saddam's
hit list; Gulf War II, hmm ...? YMMV). So,
with this assumption, in Baghdad Saddam had
spent a huge bundle on anti-aircraft means --
radars, guns, and missiles. Okay. Sorry,
Saddam, for all those millions, you didn't get
10 cents worth. Why? Because Lockheed had
developed the F-117, and it flew into the
Baghdad anti-aircraft means and supposedly
never got even a single scratch.
Lesson: Given the assumption that Gulf War I
was to be fought, we really, really like
the F-117.
The F-22? No doubt there are scenarios where
its superiority would be similar.
Broadly it appears that the US has military
planners sitting around evaluating what
potential enemies might be able to do and, then,
coming up with military R&D programs to
keep the US ahead. Then, if the stuff the
US develops is sufficiently superior, say,
like the F-117 or the SR-71,
then the chances of actual shooting go way down
and the superior US weapons in effect
did the best we could hope for.
Now, for the cost of an F-22, likely that
is heavily for just its crucial attribute --
being way ahead as technology. So, pay
super big bucks for the F-22 #1 and much
less for #2, #3, .... Or, what's crucial
about the F-22 is not that we have built
some airplanes but that we have
created some highly superior technology,
that gets used in some real airplanes.
Or the F-22 is part of a technology race
where, like for the F-117, the US wants
to win, against any and all competition.
I hope we do.
Uh, in Gulf War I, Saddam's planes? Soon
enough they saw that getting off the
ground and heading to the Americans
was a fast way to a smoking hole and, thus,
just took the back way to Iran and parked.
Not a chance. Saddam's planes didn't
have a chance.
In Gulf War I, supposedly the US had
more injuries from rest and recreation
than from enemy action. Now if we have
to fight a war, then that's how we want
to fight it.
Or, once General Schwarzkopf
was asked what happened to those
many thousands of Iraqi
soldiers out in the Iraqi desert
defending against an attack from
Saudi Arabia? The answer: "They
are still there.".
Uh, there was one more: Saddam had
a lot of Russian tanks. Maybe
they were really good tanks, maybe
tough and rugged. Their gun could
shoot a mile. Ah, but then there
was the US tank: Also tough and
rugged, likely more so than for the
Russian tanks.
With a gas turbine engine
to permit especially fast speed
for a tank.
Then we get to the really good stuff:
(a)
The US tank could see through dust,
fog, and in the dark (infrared, etc.).
(b) The gun on the US tank could
shoot 2 miles. (c) The US tank
could shoot while moving while
the Russian tank had to stop to shoot.
Hmm (a)-(c) -- guess what happened
in the US-Iraqi tank battles? Remember
that the Iraqi tank could shoot only
1 mile, and the US tank could shoot twice
that far. So, by the time an Iraqi tank
was in range to shoot, it was already dead.
So, how'd the US tanks be so much better?
Sure: Technology. Much of the cost of
the US tanks? Technology R&D and not
just metal work.
The movie buff in me enjoys the fact that a lot of this can be summed up with 2 quotes from Iron Man 1.
"Tony Stark: Well, Ms. Brown. It's an imperfect world, but it's the only one we got. I guarantee you the day weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I'll start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals."
and
"Tony Stark: They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once. That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."
The R&D costs far exceed the actual production costs and on a side note it is interesting and pleasing that lots of this R&D eventually makes its way into consumer products likewise how technology from racing (esp. Formula 1) makes its way into consumer vehicles as well.
That being said, another way to win a war against a technologically superior foe is just as the article suggests, being willing and able to win the battle of attrition. Example: U.S. Sherman tanks vs. German Panzers and Tigers. However, it is our unwillingness to sacrifice lives that has led to these R&D breakthroughs so one could argue that we have in fact won by finding ways not to lose. Although, just like what the article states, if we lose a war because we're not willing to win the war through attrition then the war didn't serve any real purpose at all.
Let's communicate more clearly than the OP did: The
US could have won in Iraq in Gulf War I and II and
in Afghanistan. How? Kill everyone who resisted.
How? That's the strange part: For US military
technology, killing lots of people is nearly as easy
as pushing some buttons. E.g., an Iraqi officer was
amazed -- praise from an adversary is especially welcome:
There was an Iraqi tank parked tightly between
two buildings, and the US put a missile on the
tank, destroyed it, and didn't hit either of the
buildings. The officer said: "American military
technology is beyond belief". Well, it was to him.
The biggie point was, the US didn't want to kill that
many people in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead a main
goal was to help them get a good constitution, elections,
elected government, government of laws instead of
something else, freedom of speech, the press, assembly,
religion, have well trained police,
etc.,
roads, schools, hospitals,
move into the 20th, maybe the 21st century, become
a good member of the nations of the world,
etc.
Why that goal? Because the US does not want to
be seen as an imperialist or colonial power
or an occupying force. Instead US policy
since WWII has been to help US security
by having other countries be democratic
with strong economies hoping that that combination
will keep down shooting.
Indeed, after Gulf War II, W was against
doing a lot to occupy and govern Iraq and, instead,
stated that
"The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of
governing themselves." Well, not exactly
"perfectly"; maybe after some civil wars, etc.
Well, for the cases the OP mentioned, that
US goal of democracy, etc. flopped.
Why flopped? In both cases, Islam had more power
to run the place than anything the US brought
unless the US just killed a lot more people,
likely most of the Mullahs. The US didn't want
to do that. Could the US have done that? Sure:
Easily. Just push some buttons. Trivial.
But would also kill a lot of dogs, cats,
women, children, peaceful people, etc., say,
like the US did in WWII fire bombing cities
in Germany and Japan, or, say, like
Germany did in their bombing of London,
Warsaw, etc.
Actually one broad lesson is that actually
freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion,
etc. is often much less welcome, sometimes
even in the US,
than the
US founding fathers assumed!
The core of such freedoms is that
people need not conform. Alas, a too
common response to differences
from such freedoms
is to pull a trigger or plant a bomb.
Saddam said that we'd have a heck of a time
keeping Iraq together -- we're learning that
now. Saddam did keep the place together, but
he borrowed from the Stalin playbook. The US
thought that that was cruel -- it is. But
maybe more Iraqis have died per month since
Gulf War II or I than before it.
Maybe what Joe Biden often said would be the
right stuff -- partition the place into
separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
With some irony, one interpretation of what
is going on now is just that.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Mullahs are
not much afraid of US weapons because
they know that the US would be reluctant
to kill enough Afghans to make those weapons
defeat the Mullahs.
But for someone like a Saddam who wants
to have a big army, air force, etc.
and invade their neighbors, as in Gulf War I,
the US can win in six weeks of bombing and
100 hours on the ground.
For any country that wants to use nuclear
weapons, the US still is awash in
weapons only "have to use once".
In Viet Nam, the situation was similar but
otherwise somewhat different: The US
could never find anyone to support in Saigon
who could also get enough support of
the people of South Viet Nam.
But in Viet Nam, the US could have won there,
too: Just be willing to kill a lot more
people. Sadly, a lot more, even a lot
more than we did kill, which was
sad enough.
When my HP laser printer quit,
I got a Brother printer. It's terrific,
and it's made in Viet Nam. Good for
Viet Nam.
I never understood just why the US
had so much trouble in Viet Nam:
We should have been able to have
sat down with Ho and cut a deal:
The US will give you a lot of stuff,
darned near anything you could want
in products, technology, universities,
medical care, development loans,
roads, bridges,
hydroelectric facilities,
telephones, good trade agreements,
South Viet Nam, etc. if you would
just quit going to Peking and Moscow
for free lunches and trash talking the
US. Should have been a good deal for
both sides.
For Iraq? Just sit down with Saddam
and make him an offer, personally,
one on one, he couldn't refuse.
For the German Tiger tanks, from all
I've understood from the history,
the US managed mostly to avoid the
Tiger tanks in tank to tank battles.
Instead: (A) We avoided those tanks,
e.g., during the Normandy invasion,
due to US air superiority, the Germans
had a tough time even getting Tiger
tanks to Normandy. (B) Otherwise
in Europe, the US killed Tiger tanks
heavily from the air, e.g., from
P-47s. (C) Otherwise, say, in North
Africa, the US used artillery.
In the Battle of the Bulge
maybe the Tiger tanks were low
on fuel.
Maybe the Tiger tanks were in
a "battle of attrition" tank to tank battles
with Russia at Kursk.
Broadly in conventional war, win the air battle,
and the rest is routine and not in doubt.
That's what the US did to both
Germany and Japan and to Saddam in Gulf War I.
And that's what the Battle of Britain
was about: Germany knew that they had
to win the air war before invading
England, Germany was not able to
win the air war against the British --
mostly because the German planes did
not have enough range.
And, in short, winning the air war is
the purpose of the
F-22 now.
The economy is not some game where millions of people needlessly do actions for no purpose. We don't hire people at great expense to purposelessly move mountains between states, or rip each others hair out. The economy allocates resources. The fact that some of the wasted dollars spent on needless militarism splashes back into producing food for some of the people that were taxed in the first place isn't a goal, its a pitiful side effect. The same resources could have been used to further spaceflight, AI, public health, peace, or the environment in or outside of public spending. Warfare is a hellish waste.
A lot of it comes back to the broken education system in the US. The military and prison system absorb some of the least employable and underprivileged young men and women. In the case of the military it gives them a sense of purpose and pride. In the best case they either learn a trade or can go to college afterwards. And as a sibling comment points out, military spending has for the longest time been used for high technology research (Bell labs, MIT etc.).
> The military and prison system absorb some of the least employable and underprivileged young men and women.
Have you ever actually met someone in the military, or does your knowledge come from movies and TV? The vast majority of Americans don't meet the military's standards; our officer and enlisted corps are some of the most employable people in the country. They're smart, capable and dedicated, precisely what one wants in employees.
> The same resources could have been used to further spaceflight, AI, public health, peace, or the environment in or outside of public spending. Warfare is a hellish waste.
It's by no means perfect, but military spending has greatly benefited spaceflight, AI, public health (aid after disasters, advanced prosthetics), etc.
While this is but that only looking at one part of the coin, its very hard to say what outcomes would have happend if these resources were allocated diffrently, either by markets or some other governemnt programm.
The hole idea that 'lets make war and we will probebly get some side benefits out of it' is not substainable, we could have any arbitrary goal and dumb money on the problem and we will get side benefits.
As a minor example we might mention the Internet, which basically grew out of projects funded by DARPA. DARPA by the way was originally started up by Eisenhower, who someone mentioned in another comment.
What who you rather get out of your tax dollars, roads and parks and fast internet, or explosives and ammo? Both mean jobs for Americans all the same. It's the value of the output that's different.
Why funnel efforts and capital into military instead of funneling the same into producing infrastructure, consumer goods, and advancing science? Yes, both are contributing to "the economy". One is creating collective value, the other is enriching military contractors and creating an incentive to wage war.
> People funnel money into the military because they are afraid of terrorists and whatever else is the flavor of the month.
Do you know any individuals who personally decided to funnel money into the military? It's an insatiable beast fed by political breakdown and cronyism.
You don't need many tanks to fight terrorists. Yet the army is forced to buy more tanks (against its own wishes!), because congressmen don't want the tank-production in their state to stop.
That's not how federal spending works. There is no fixed amount so spending money on the military does not preclude spending money on space research. Similarly, cutting military spending doesn't mean those savings would go into any other budget.
Building bombs and guns is the economic equivalent of depression-era ditch digging (worse, in fact, since they can only be used to destroy economic output). Sure, you are paying people's salary to make them but you aren't producing anything that is a benefit to the economy.
No, you're incorrectly assuming that "the economy" is a single unified whole, owned-by and benefiting a harmonious global hivemind.
In reality... the door to your home has a lock on it, right? Think about the materials and effort that went into the design, manufacture, installation, and ongoing operation of that lock. Are those "wasted"? After all, it doesn't actually produce anything new! In fact, its entire purpose is to sit there and impede the flow of resources... which would otherwise flow towards people who think they can utilize them more effectively...
For a more naturalistic example, what about your body's immune system? A big portion of your body's "budget" is invested in mechanisms for finding and destroying other organisms, ones which have done quite a bit of their own work to build themselves up. Do you honestly weigh the Staphylococcus economy equally to your own?
I imagine I would find it somewhat more difficult to justify having the most heavily locked door in the world - which, by reasonable context, is closer to analogy being drawn above.
Someone has to have killed the most children as well, but that's hardly a justification one would care to rely on in court.
My point was not that no-one could justify an extreme of door locks but that I could not. If someone wants to try and justify an extreme of door locks, they're welcome to do so. But merely noting that we all do some thing, or that someone has to have done the most of it, is not such a justification even by analogy.
I disagree with the "context" you're trying to conjure up here. Petersellers' post is quite explicit, and directly equates paying for the construction/use of weapons to paying laborers to dig/re-fill holes in the ground.
At no point did he say it was disproportionate to the nation's wealth (or dirt-supply.)
Rather, his post argues it shouldn't happen at all.
In a part of the discussion talking about the arms industry funnelling tax dollars back into the American economy. I don't find it particularly unlikely that someone might then equate, within that context, it to be effectively analogous to ditch digging and not bother to qualify their remark more fully.
But, we can assume:
1. That Petersellers has grown to adulthood with a remarkably naive understanding of human nature.
2. Believes that the industrial and design capacities of modern nations are such that we could conjure effective weapons faster than a strike could be effectively delivered.
3. That they meant their statement in a somewhat more bound form.
Since 1 & 2 seem either unlikely to be held, or to be held by a mind that hasn't been convinced by the other arguments / observations it would have come across to the contrary, the latter seems the most useful context to interpret their remarks in. The others would either be mistaken assumptions or remove the point of talking to them.
I think you are underestimating the effect that globalization has regarding the linking of economies of nations together. Blowing up your neighbor will result in negative consequences for your own economy, even if they aren't a direct trading partner with you.
Additionally, your analogies don't really fit with the behavior of the US and how it utilizes its vast military resources. We aren't acting defensively, we are instead acting very aggressively and overthrowing governments who we perceive to be our enemy.
Maybe my initial statement wasn't very clear: I'm not for a 100% reduction in military costs, as I think it can provide an insurance benefit when used defensively. But in the context of the discussion, regarding the funneling of trillions of dollars into the machine: that level of spending is incredibly wasteful, unnecessary and even harmful when you consider the negative side effects that have arisen from our brazen use of these resources.
What you don't quite understand is that there are inherent costs of inefficiencies of monopoly from a militaristic system like ours. Sure, all the people "employed" by defense contractors and military are funneling money into the economy, but it's so grotesquely inefficient and wasteful of a process, let along there are those huge losses for inefficiency and unnecessary management and corruption that comes with it, not even to mention that the smart guys who take a job with a defense contractor to pump out some shitty code or manage a shitty project as a result of corruption and congressional micro-management; could have developed a new technology or started a business to contribute something positive to society.
What you seem to be missing is that military expenditures beyond self-defense are mostly inefficiencies. Squandered money and efforts and potential all because our form of warlords are siphoning off trillions of dollars from our economy and collective efficacy. It's really not any different than the same thing warlords to in the places you think of when I say warlord like Somalia or Afghanistan or the DR Congo; just far more sophisticated and devious in their effect.
Why not to give away these dollars to the workers then, but without building weapons? Just make sure that workers are not sitting idle and attend gym during work hours.
End result is the same, whether bombs are in the storage or are not in the storage - all we see is a locked storage door anyway.
This has positive benefits such as companies like FN opening up shop stateside thus providing jobs to Americans. If I remember correctly, FN is now the largest small arms producer in the U.S. even surpassing Colt as far as supplying arms to the military and the civilian market.
Yes, commercial businesses are obviously part of the economy. I was just being more specific, lest the parent comment be construed as referring to general economic stimulus.
Sure, but a very large fraction of that money goes into things that are quite literally just blown to bits. There is an actual destruction of resources.
Conservation of energy insists that it's just a reallocation of resources.
Today's landfills (and bombing targets) are tomorrow's mines. It's only when we get into nuclear materials that those resources become inviable for rediscovery.
No, because it's increasing entropy. In the case of explosives, one could argue the entire point is to produce maximum entropy. Which means they are effectively designed to minimize the value that can be reclaimed after they are used.
"Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy,"
This is called military Keynesianism. It's how you can sell Keynesian economics in conservative societies that oppose anything resembling "social" spending. Since it's somehow not wasteful or "socialist" to funnel unlimited stimulus money through the defense budget, that's where it gets funneled.
The catch is that you have to have a war somewhere to keep justifying it.
Im absolutly no Keynsian but you are misrepresting it. Keynesiansim is not 'lots of government spending' its about increasing spending in case of AD shortfall.
Now that might be millitary spending but that only works in a limited set of cases.
But the basic idea is of course often used as a excuse by lots of people. Turns out neither the voters nor the politicans have actually read much actual economic theory.
The economy means different things to different people. The black economy is part of the economy but I would not want to funnel trillions of dollars into it. Similarly the arms trade is part of the economy but I wouldn't want to funnel a trillion dollars into it every year.
For my money the century of mechanised was has been about taking money out of the economy and into the arms-trade. This shows up as GDP and is therefore a good thing but it is at the expense of things like schools and hospitals. Government borrowing has been at record levels during the 'terror' years, government spending on weapons has been at an all time high. The money gets borrowed from the banks that the politicians know so well. It is a virtuous cycle for them but not us even if that is what they say.
I would argue that the entire point is to destabilize regions. Its a technique that all superpowers have used in the past, and continue to use today. The point is not "to win".
Bingo. Only a wide-eyed statist would ask "why do we fight all these wars we can't win". Uh, we're winning them alright.
The point, as you said, is to destabilize some key regions so that a certain chosen territory can live off an oil monopoly and control pipelines across continents.
Not to worry. With how things are going in Ukraine, we'll have a great war in Europe again before you know it, with a "real" enemy (Russia). (And we have all that anti-terror stuff to prevent any broad and effective anti-war movement developing... both on the NATO side and on the Russian side). With any "luck" it'll be like when monarchies went to war in the middle ages. Invest in DynCorp International and Academi (nee Blackwater) now.
What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.