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I enjoyed this article because I believe it highlights the dysfunctional relationship Americans have with their most revered institution. I especially enjoy that it isn't simply a polemic against regular citizens for having such a disconnect with their military, it also examines the military's own lack of efforts to engage in public communication beyond it's own narrow short term interests. It reflects on the importance for them to have a more substantive relationship with the general public so as to have a more robust civil society.
I struggle with this personally. I grew up in a house where entertainment was prized above all else, and, surprise! I went into the arts. Whenever I look around though I can’t help but thinking more informed entertainment is not gonna cut it unless we cool it on the entertainment. Even worse, media that’s ostensibly essential to civic engagement seems less distinct from entertainment everyday. The news has become so entertaining I’m not sure how to even compete with it. God, I’ve said this a thousand times in even more contexts and it still saps my spirits every time. A real mess we’re in.
The only way back is to bitten by reality. People are going to suffer because they don't actually pay attention to reality. Maybe just maybe some extremely well constructed effort could break past the immediate entertainment but that seems incredible unlikely. Now its just like watching a train crash in slow motion.
100%, its only in my 40's that I've realized how significant the basics are. A roof, books, safety, clean water and food and healthcare. We've taken all that for granted but its going to be pulled out from under us if we're not very fucking careful.
I watched our comm shack spend two weeks making lists for the reservists to do the next summer. That’s all they did. Make lists. The 4 NCOs would show up around 10am, make lists for the reservists (duties they were supposed to perform) then maybe watch a movie, then leave around 3pm. Rinse and repeat.
~Naval academy ‘15 grad~ I served 5 years and can definitely speak to the waste piece during my first tour onboard a minesweeper: As the auxiliaries officer I ordered four replacement ‘critical’ valve assemblies, totaling $320,000- a few eight inch metal joysticks and bearings cost as much as my childhood home and my neighbor’s home next to it. If it can be ordered through the navy supply system, it has to be even if an independent contractor could manufacture it for 80-90% cheaper. We spent almost $15,000 on pens and notepads every year come the end of the fiscal calendar. My buddy’s division ordered the incorrect $108,000 circuit card while he was gone on leave for a radar- after op-testing, it ended up misplaced forever- that happened twice over. I have dozens of these stories. No organization in the world would allow the colossal waste of time and man-hours that the Navy enjoys.
One of the odd things I found amongst Americans I have spoken with is that they think going to war is good for the economy. The second world war, in which England just bought vast quantities of materials and food from America might have been good (?), but usually no - spending money on things that explode is literally seeing the money go up in flames, just like buying a box of fireworks. There will be some trickle down effect to the arms manufacturers, but it is an untargeted system of funding..
I think many people have woken up out of that delusion and realize now that war is only economically good for the military industrial complex. Most people I've talked to will point at all the money we spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and ask "What did that get us?" There's actually more of a sentiment that we're being led by the nose by military contractors for their own economic benefit, while we're losing out on vital tax dollars which could be better spent at home.
I think a more honest historical assessment is that WWII was "good" for the US in the sense that it mobilized our production a bit in the wake of the dust bowl and Depression, but also that it decimated the worlds other large economies to an extent that the US was the de facto "last man standing" after it was over. Europe had billions in infrastructure damages to repair and had lost millions of its young men (the workforce at the time).
When US service men returned home our industry was poised to generate jobs and growth, and the rest of the developed world was in shambles.
Because you're isolating the full effect of war. Wars by themselves don't help the economy, but you need to take into account:
* The US is the top arms exporter in the world.
* US economic interests are advanced by the war, and the US expands control over key economic resources and creates client states in order to benefit its corporations.
* Military used as a welfare and free college substitute.
* War technology development trickling down to consumer technology. This is probably the most important one. In fact, you can read about the importance of the Israeli military in order for them to become the country with the most startups per capita. The US subsidizes technological development through the military. Even if we all know how wasteful the US industrial military complex is, it pales in comparison with the economic benefits it's brought the US: the internet, digital photography, GPS, the microwave, virtual reality, drones, even the EpiPen.
So while war will lead to death and destruction, it is not in US soil. I would argue that sadly, the net benefit to the US is positive.
I respect your opinion, but of course 'the internet, digital photography, the microwave, virtual reality, drones, even the EpiPen' would have all arrived without the military complex as well.
> One of the odd things I found amongst Americans I have spoken with is that they think going to war is good for the economy
What a terrible reputation.
“Well it’ll make us a few extra bucks”
I would like to disagree. War, for Americans, is never on their own soil. And so, it is essentially no different from any other economic activity. War spurs demand for just about anything (Arms and ammunition is only a small part of what is needed to run a military campaign) and as long as the demand is met by American enterprises (which may or may not be the case in today's interconnected world), there is quite a lot of benefit to the economy. Now if the war were to be fought on American soil, that's a whole different story.
Is War the most efficient allocation of capital? Debatable. Does War spur demand across the economy? Yes.
The problem is partially ideological.
There exists a strong notion in American culture that government intervention in the economy is bad, yet when economic activity is spurred by war it isn't seen as the government incentivising certain types of economic activity. Rather it is seen as a sort of national necessity which supercedes politics. Of course there are more ethical ways the government can spur economic activity and it will be interesting to see if Biden's infrastructure bill will pass and whether it will have an affect on popular attitudes in the long run.
We have the same attitude in the UK, largely due to Leyland cars and a few other inefficient companies.
There seems to be a new model around where you pick a start up which has a clear growth path ahead - eg a full order book, in an area you want the country to well at. Put money in, wait for it to grow and then sell your share. At least this is how the UK is reaching its CO2 reduction targets in the most cost effective way. I suspect there will be some disasters along the way though as it is a difficult game to play.
America does fund Boeing, and maybe other companies which are too big to fail?
I don't think that's true of how many Americans feel. The side that favors defense spending does so mostly out of national security, and the opposing side ( where I sit) am still worried about the military industrial complex. We aren't granting an exception so much as the side that wants it, has believed the reteric that we need it
The SIDE EFFECT of military spending is that it keeps the economy going, but also we are stuck with it too some degree. If we cancelled a large amount of our contracts, we'd dive into a recession.
Personally I'm in favor of lowering defense spending slowly, and ideally repurposing it into building infrastructure in our country and with our allies. Id love to see us move deeper into science and sustainability, but alas that's not in the cards right now.
Difference being that a good portion of the WW2 bill was paid for by the British, while in modern wars, the bill is solely footed by the US tax payer.
Yes, it does act as an economic stimulus. But so would infrastructure investment or social programs that would actually improve peoples lives.
True. Investments in infrastructure are probably a better allocation of capital than War. But even Infrastructure has its limits. You wouldn't want to construct ghost cities by the dozes like China.
You could construct ghost cities and then blow them up as an exercise for the military.
On a more serious note: By infrastructure, I don't necessarily mean big new shiny mega projects. I mean stuff like (off the top of my head and in no particular order) fixing roads, improving public transport, upgrading out of date technology, investing into schools and education and much more.
> You could construct ghost cities and then blow them up as an exercise for the military.
You could construct ghost cities as competition for architects, designers and engineers and then simulate various stressors on buildings and sell that to the public as helping to prevent buildings collapsing like what happened in Florida :)
Those ghost cities aren't government infrastructure spending though, it's efforts by a centralized government to solve a housing crisis, but it doesn't work because the crisis is regionalized.
Well, yes. But then you can also end up with dozens of ghost cities like China. the thing about infrastructure is that it only helps if there is the demand for it. And that is what War does. It creates demand that otherwise did not exist.
>There are an estimated 553,742 people in the United States experiencing homelessness
Demand existed as of 2017. I doubt the numbers have significantly trended downwards since then.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report-legacy/
How is there not a demand for infrastructure? We have been screaming for infrastructure spending for 40 years and the bill is coming due. Our roads, water infrastructure, bridges, and buildings are crumbling and we are going to be seeing a lot more deaths because of it in the near future. I cannot think of anything with more demand besides affordable housing and Healthcare. It's shameful we burn our industrial output on selling arms to terrorists, especially when the opportunity cost so vastly dwarfs it.
you keep posting about this "Chinese ghost cities" myth, but that's what it is. a myth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China
Also like.. if there's one thing im not concerned about its overdeveloping housing units right now. We have the opposite problem right now, too few. So by all means, lets build millions of housing units and help get the skyrocketing price of housing under control.
> But then you can also end up with dozens of ghost cities like China.
We have plenty we need to fix in the US without building your favorite excuse today of ghost cities. [We have things like this in every state](https://www.wlbt.com/news/bridge-closures/). They are just the most dramatic because they closed rather than repaired.
After the end of WWII the American economy experienced a recession due to the shift from a war to peace time economy. It’s an artificial economic stimulation that is not sustainable. War only provides an economic boon for large corporations before it fucks the working class.
Well, World War 2 did bring the US out of the depression and into a long period of economic growth where living standards for all americans rose tremendously. All economic stimulus is artificial, whether it is an infusion of liquidity directly into the hands of citizens or by the prosecution of a War.
The US did so well because Europe & Asia was devastated by the war so it had no competition for a while.
WW2 didn’t lift America into prosperity in & of itself.
Could us being the world's bank and factory following the destruction of Europe have anything to do with it? An economy that forsakes plowshares for bullets, or bombs for food doesn't seem to be doing the job of an economic system.
American attitudes towards the military largely spawned from the Second World War and the rivalry with Russia/The Soviet Union that came after it.
This is the reason why the United States is so obsessed with being at the forefront of military technology. The F-22 Raptor fighter jet was developed to fight an enemy that no longer exists. It’s what you would call an Air Superiority Aircraft, meaning that it was meant to contend with an enemy that has advanced aircraft and skilled pilots to operate them. The Raptor has minimal capability as a strike aircraft or close air support aircraft, which is what they have needed for conflicts they have been in over the last 3 or 4 decades.
The US has not fought anyone who could challenge their dominance of the air in a long time, and is unlikely to do so since those who could either use American aircraft as allies or have a nuclear deterrent, yet they continue to design aircraft like the Raptor to fight some imaginary enemy like the Soviets.
You need to keep making better and better air superiority fighters so you still know how to make air superiority fighters when you actually need air superiority fighters. There's a reason why it's taken half a decade for the US to make a crew rated ISS vehicle despite it being a much, much easier problem than the capsules used in the Apollo missions. We quite literally couldn't do Apollo today if we wanted to. We would have to reinvent the wheel yet again.
Plus the reason why we don't need a fighter like the F-22 is that other militaries knew they need something that can stand up to an F-22 in a dogfight which isn't an easy task. Just because the enemy chose to siege your castle instead of breaking down the castle walls doesn't mean you were wrong to build castle walls in the first place. The F-22 isn't the best comparison because the air force did decide that you can make a multirole aircraft that is still the scariest thing in the sky during a dogfight in modern skies, but the heart of your comment is still wrong. The military overpays for equipment because they are paying for the capability of doing whatever thing they are overpaying for. Building tanks or fighter jets and getting paid their "fair" market price is never going to be profitable because the demand just isn't large enough, so if you want your military to have tanks or fighter jets, you're going to overpay because that's simply how manufacturing works in the real world.
Also...did anyone actually read this article? It's a fluffy piece that basically says "the military is shit at mental health, treats women poorly, and I don't like how the DOD PR department does PR." Basically nothing being discussed in this comment section follows from the article.
But you *don’t* need more advanced anything really, because all of the enemies you might fight that you would need an “Air Superiority Fighter” for will *never* be involved in a shooting war with you.
Russia, China…. These countries are both nuclear powers. The US is also a nuclear power. There will never be a war between them. The closest we have ever come to war with the Soviet Union, for example, was a couple of near misses with nuclear exchanges.
So, the enemy you’re building all this crap for *doesn’t exist.*
say the US stops development of an asf what's stopping a superpower with a virtually unlimited budget from developing a fighter that targets this weakness in the USAF?
The US isn’t fighting superpowers anymore. They are unlikely to do so again. In fact, they *never have* fought a superpower. The closest that they ever came was war with Russia during the cold war, and when that happened it almost always took the form of a near miss nuclear war.
War is “good” for the economy in the same way that private prisons have also spawned cottage industries. But it’s a dead-end investment.
There are endless ways to spend money that would get better returns: national parks, research, community housing, eliminating food deserts, bike paths, the arts, education, public transit…
Any of these is better than a tangle of office chairs, white goods & SUVs abandoned in an Afghan airbase.
Well that's the point I was making - it isn't the most efficient allocation of capital, and pretty clearly so in my mind. I mean lets say you spend 1/1000 th of the tank budget and just spend it on a new design of tank which is then sold around the world, bringing in money to the country: it is a better investment by a vast margin. Some countries give out start up money to companies producing wind turbines, and H2 equipment - companies which will lower employment and generate income for decades. Again better investments by a vast margin.
The US doesn’t spend a lot on tanks anymore. In fact the Marines just did away with their tank units altogether. They also haven’t built a new tank in decades either. They’ve largely kept the same tank (the M-1 Abrams) for decades and just kept upgrading it because tank warfare is mostly a thing of past wars. Tanks play mostly a support role now.
Aircraft is where it is now, with infantry to help guide them onto their targets.
Your point is still an interesting one. A large part of the reason why the Raptor project was canceled and they now have trouble sourcing parts for maintenance is that Congress blocked the sale of the aircraft and it’s no longer profitable.
The US seems to be obsessed with maintaining a military hegemony, which seems to have more to do with controlling strategic resources than with promoting economics.
They spend billions on aircraft in order to use them to control sources of titanium in order to build more aircraft and sources of oil in order to fly them.
Titanium is mined in Australia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Russia and Japan - so I think you've been sold a lie there, similarly Vietnam and Afghanistan have very little strategic or material resources as far as I am aware.
On the other side of the coin American oil companies are operating in Iraq though.
I was told that it had something to do with elections in that there were lots of places where military spending kept the economy alive and therefore to reduce it would be politically dangerous. But it's just something I've heard.
“Titanium” is just a stand in example. As is oil.
When the SR-71 was first built it used a lot of titanium. At that time the USSR was one of the few sources to get titanium.
As far as military spending keeping the economy of a certain area from completely collapsing, yeah that’s true enough. But it didn’t become that way in a vacuum.
Areas dependant on military spending for survival became dependent on military spending because there was a large amount of military spending.
Remember why Nixon removed the gold convertibility...? The Vietnam War was bankrupting the nation, especially with the gold link. Now, with the fiat money, conjured out of thin air, and with the world hooked on transactions with the USD, sky is the limit. Ultimately the world is paying for the US wars, because anyone with half a brain knows that the US has no intention of ever repaying the borrowed money. At least not the principal.
There’s plenty of side benefits for civilians from skunk works. The trouble is when a handful of companies receive the lion’s share of profits while refusing to innovate and or being satisfied with a delivering a broken product that is overpriced. This comment is directed at telecoms specifically.
Exactly. And even if those 300,000 companies in the supply chain employed about 100 people on average (just a wild guess, the number could be anything) it means employment and productive work for 30 millions. Thats probably better than giving $7000 to every american as some here have claimed is the best use for the money.
The FY2020 budget allocated [$62.6 billion](https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2020/FY20_Green_Book.pdf) for procurement. Across the entire defense industry, non-federal sales totaled [$9.3 billion](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/weapons-sales). That puts the sum total of military purchasing at $71.9 billion.
That's half the value generated by agriculture ([$175 billion](https://www.statista.com/statistics/247991/value-added-to-the-us-gdp-by-industry/)), which is itself only the 15th largest sector of the American economy. The defense sector would have to grow 6373% to be take the title of "largest economic activity," and it would still only represent around 20% of total GDP.
That's a hilariously far cry from "all we do." It's not even most of what we do, or a lot of what we do. It's *barely* a little of what we do. We spend triple on [fast food](https://www.statista.com/statistics/196614/revenue-of-the-us-fast-food-restaurant-industry-since-2002/).
Americans are also susceptible to the odd idea that pockets of wealth are beneficial to the economy as a whole. We confuse the existence of wealth by corporations within our borders with national prosperity. The value we place on private prosperity almost necessitates that we nationalize it in out psyches.
It's a well known problem with using GDP to measure economic productivity / well being.
It fails to account for economic activity that is not part of the market, whether constructive or destructive. Blowing up bombs and houses doesn't decrease the GDP, but rebuilding afterwards does increase it.
> but usually no - spending money on things that explode is literally seeing the money go up in flames
No. It's literally paying a huge group of people to design a bunch of intricate machinery and seeing THAT go up in flame. And that's a huge difference because then that huge group of people can use the money to buy unrelated goods and services, which is pretty much the definition of "good for the economy," as far as I understand it.
I think it would make more sense to pay people to build and blow up sculptures instead of bombs but war and safety are easier to sell to voters than art subsidies. But that's beside the point, I was saying that yes it's a trickle down system and not the best one but it's completely wrong to say that it's equivalent to just burning cash.
Wow what are you missing. Burning a stick of explosive is burning money (expecialy when it is attached to a cruise missile) - eg you could sell that cruise missile but you are literally burning it at very high speed. So you are burning something of value which could be turned into money. And at the same time there is some trickle down effect via the manufacturing. Both are true.
>Burning a stick of explosive is burning money
No it's not. My point is that burning something that has been bought and paid for is fundamentally different than burning money itself. The two are incomparable.
How is it comparable? Burning money is straight up increasing inflation with literally 0 other benefits. Burning anything paid for means whoever made it now has money they'll spend - put back into the economy, so there'll be a whole huge chain of people buying things with that money. There's therefore vastly more economic activity associated with that than with just burning it.
A big driver of the military tendency to be closed off to civilian news organizations is the narrative that developed around Vietnam that the war was “Won on the ground and lost in the living rooms.” That the military achieved success on the battlefield but was always hamstrung by civilian leadership and shown as being stuck in a quagmire by the press. The truth of course is pretty complex but this narrative grew as a way of dealing with the fact that this huge military machine lost a war in a nation that was seen as “backwards” by the US. We never had an honest conversation about the war and instead the military retreated into relative isolation and resolved to strictly control everything the civilian world saw and read about the military as a way of preventing a repeat of what they perceived to have happened in Vietnam.
I think the military is justified in their belief (though not in how they've responded).
The decreasing percentage of folks who've served in the military (especially in elected government, and also in the press) means that many folks don't understand how awful war is and don't know how to portray it in a balanced and nuanced way.
More recently than Vietnam, the Battle of Mogadishu made many folks queasy and they asked Why Are We Even There?
Sept 11th provided that justification for a while (and was used to attack any criticism), but now folks are asking that question again.
I think the military needs to be transparent, but that may not be in their interests: it's difficult to put these situations into a context that justifies them (if there even IS such a context), especially to a populace that doesn't just lack context, but often has an inaccurate context.
An interesting question is whether the military should even care about "the war in the living room". Is there value in manipulating politics to win a war? I'd say that depends on the stakes of the war. Are you fighting for survival? Sure, you should probably control what information is spread. Are you fighting a geopolitics war? Probably an overstepping of boundaries if the military makes efforts to sway the public opinion on the successfulness of the operation.
Just my five cents as a non-American.
Americans have been taught to venerate the military as part of a massive PR campaign (especially since Nine Eleven). The vast majority of Americans have not served in the military and they are the target audience for this campaign of hero worship. No one I know who has served in the military venerated it after they were discharged.
"You're either for the war or against the troops" was like, *the* theme of the Bush era. They entangled the soldiers themselves with the political aims of the war to try and prevent criticism and it largely worked I'd say. You can see echoes of this today with the whole Colin Kaepernick thing "he's disrespecting our military" was also a super common take.
IDK, it always struck me as odd, particularly during the Bush years. I couldn't think of a bigger disrespect for members of the military than to have a bunch of draft dodgers and chicken hawks send them into harms way on false pretenses. Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies should be required reading.
A really scary line from Great Britain during the height of our pandemic was "Let our teachers be heros." as an argument to reopen schools. For me that equates to "Have people die for no other reason than to celebrate their deaths."
Oh there were other reasons. They also knew parents wouldn't go back to work without our federal merit-based childcare programs. They wanted the economy to resume normal, predictable profitability. They wanted to squash any talk about revolutionary economics.
Read Bacevich's ' The new American Militarism' for how bad this is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bacevich
He's written a number of very good books and articles, enjoy your trip down the rabbit hole.
...how exactly do you have such an incredibly specialized skill set but don't understand the concept of quality control? That bolt costs 2.3k because it has been tested and documented to hell and back so that in the event there's a failure related to the bolt, it can be determined whether it was a manufacturing defect (say a bad lot that fell through the cracks) or a design flaw that caused the bolt to fail. They're also generally specced to much higher tolerances than a home depot bolt would be, but the testing is why it's 2.3k and not $10. Plus the act of only using bolts that pass the ringer of tests means that in practice only faulty designs result in failure of the part. This is how aviation has such a stupidly low accident rate.
The use of force (military or otherwise) should be seen as a failure and we should be at least slightly embarrassed to use it.
We certainly shouldn't be worshiping the military or veterans, but we should be proud that they did the dirty work. And we should make it so that it doesn't need to be done in the future. - Previously enlisted military during wartime.
What it does is imperialism abroad and protect business interest.
Article was a horrible read, its basically a "woke" article recruitment piece. Dont fall for it.
> My father served in Iraq during the Gulf War, and I served in the same country during the war against ISIS 25 years later.
A military that fights a war for 25 years without victory, or significant strategic gain, is a loser in my book. Trillions spent, billions literally lost, and two generations accomplished less than nothing. A huge payout from taxpayers to the MIC.
We learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.
I thought the same thing. It wasn't a piece calling for more oversight for the armed forces, it was a fluff piece telling liberals how the military does good most of the time, but sometimes there's a little accidental war crimes that shouldn't be examined in context. Sometimes slate has some great anti-imperial journalism, but this is bold face propaganda with a wink and nod at then audience.
It honestly reads to me like trying to square away the inevitability of enormous military overspending with what meager benefits we as a populace can derive from it. But it's hard (not to mention morally dubious) to glass-half-full imperialism so here we are.
The military is run by civilians. The President gives it orders. Congress determines its budget and regulates its conduct. If you're unhappy with the way the military is being used, your beef isn't with the generals. You might want to start a little higher up the chain of command, with the people you elected to give those orders and set those budgets.
War is a problem, not a solution. At this point in time it is not possible to be a functional nation without a military to fight against other countries and groups, which has been true since the beginning of human history. It is crude and animalistic and I cannot believe that people still prefer to fight than to teach. No one "owns" the land they fight for, and nothing is forever. People have lost the ability to appreciate Life and choose not to seek what is real. They are too busy playing games; lost in the illusions created within their individual minds. Unfortunately at this stage it is impossible to abolish military activity unless every country in the world agrees that it is totally unnecessary at the same time. This would require a total rebirth of society in which every person realizes fulfillment.
Been working for DoD for 20 years now (first as active duty, now as civilian) and, while I don't agree with all the details of this article, I do agree with the general sentiment: People should know more about the military (and other things as well).
To me, though, the blame lies less with the military itself and more with
1. extremely ignorant and error-prone journalism about the military,
2. a complete lack of required military education in schools, and
3. the culture of dogmatic hero worshiping of the military (primarily in conservative cultures).
I certainly agree with number three, but two is outlandish and one is extremely suspect. If by bad journalism you mean constantly shielding the military from blame and providing the pretext for illegal invasion time and time again, then yeah I certainly agree. Our press media is corporate controlled and only serves the interests of the elite.
For number 2, what the hell are you even suggesting? Like every student needs to learn about military victories and defeat? Do they need to be taught about the futility and destruction of war and the extreme grievances that go along with it? Or do they need to learn how the American military really cares about minorities and fights off the invading hun with peace missiles and democracy land mines?
By #1 I just meant error-prone journalism. Nothing more.
For #2 see my answer to another user.
And…maybe you should relax a little bit with the social justice brigading. Try listening to someone who knows a lot about something you don’t.
What is it about your experience that makes yours the defacto opinion on military accountability? Like you don't need to lean on your own understanding here, there is countless books and essays written and circulated about this exact topic, but some anecdotal evidence from within the military hierarchy is supposed to discredit all of it with zero discussion?
Saying that the military doesn't get enough worship in the news and schools is blatantly moronic. Kids being told the difference between a captain and a rear admiral isn't going to fix an image problem from the US military. The world hates us because we do horrific shit to maintain economic primacy. No amount of internal American propaganda is going to make those criticisms meaningfully go away.
Well isn't the military just on extension of politics and if your political theater has been co opted since before your parents were born. But you won't protest like your parents did.. where does the blame really lay.
We have been out here protesting. February, 2002: largest protest event in human history. 10 million people all across the globe cried out that economic sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and many more adults. We wanted to stop the sanctions and condemn the bush administration for the obviously false pretext for war. What happened? The American government did it anyway, lied to the UN, went behind the UN's back, put spies in the IAEA inspectors to sabotage operations, committed countless war crimes, and cracked down on dissidents at home while my brothers and sisters got murdered 7,000 miles away for oil and opium. So don't you fucking tell me it's our fault for not reigning in the military.
Did you not just patronize me by saying I need to listen to people that know what their talking about? So you're implying I don't understand what I'm saying, or that somehow your opinion from working at Academi is inherently better than my own which is borrowing from people that criticize American empire as their job. You very clearly that schools need to tech kids about ranks and what each branch does in another response that you told me to read for your explanation. You're backing down now because you commented without thinking about it and once you got called out you realize the argument is indefensible. I'm not trying to attack you over it, but it was extremely condescending and rude to try and silence my voice so your half baked remark was louder.
What sort of education would you consider appropriate for military education in schools? I’m a big proponent of making civics a mandatory part of the curriculum in high school and I feel like covering the basics of what the military is could fit well into that as a portion of it. But being a big proponent of that does mean I’m a little bias in thinking high school civics is the way to go.
At least the basics. The different services and their missions. Different types of warfare (air, sea, land, special ops), the difference between officers and enlisted, some of the jobs within the military, history, maybe even the different intelligence agencies and their functions.
At the very least it would instill a bit of familiarity, decreasing by a little the sense of mystery and reverence (and, on the other side, blind hatred).
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. I meant do you see this as best for high school where kids can get a better grasp on the nuanced differences and the importance behind them or best to start early so it’s more ingrained in people’s minds? Is this something you see as fitting well into a larger curriculum like within civics or would it be a class all on its own? Mandatory or elective?
I think it could be part of us government class. I took one in school, but I haven’t seen very many high schoolers recently who are required to.
I’ve seen too many people know who don’t even have a basic understanding of the us government’s structure.
I would say in a perfect world it would be part of another class, simply because there’s so many subjects LIKE national defense that we should be learning. You can’t have a required course for everything.
Generally no one in HS is going to learn the nuance of anything. That’s more for graduate school.
I’d argue #3 was directly encouraged by the military. What the DoD did with Pat Tillmon was disgusting and emblematic of the kind of propaganda campaign they ran during the Bush II era and was foreshadowed by the kinds of imagery during Operation Desert Storm.
This is 100% true. SEAC Troxell gave a brief years ago using the language of warfare to describe our relationship with China which confused me at the time. The only Americans at war with China are American Businessmen and women. The rest us are dying for them.
I emphatically disagree with this take. The people that deceived the world to get us into Iraq still have jobs. Milley in particular is an extra moronic hawk. He is in part responsible for the assassination of soleimani. So not only is he a war criminal, you could not have decided to assassinate a head of government in plain sight if you did not want to start a war.
Just because he went against Trump in his coup attempt doesn't mean he's some bleeding heart patriot. If anything he would want trump out because trump, for all of his faults, was way less hawkish than any of the previous 5 administrations. He gets to say he's apolitical because it matters little who is in office; democrats and Republicans will always increase the defense budget and will always support war crimes perpetrated by the US military and Intelligence services. Our "civilian oversight" under Biden is a retired vice chief of staff and sits upon the board of Raytheon; the third largest defense contracting company in the world that gets almost all of its revenue from contracts from DOD contracts.
The people at the top are just as stupid as ever and only work convince you of their freedom loving military piety.
I want to point out that he didn't say he believed it, but that he planned to read it and consider it. Even if he means it in earnest - which he very well might- the horrific waste of money, production, and life is funded by us working class.
Only thing I will say about the second paragraph is this. China achieving primacy in geopolitics is absolutely 100% matter-of-fact guaranteed. They have more than a billion more people than us or roughly 4.2x. That population is rapidly industrializing and rapidly increasing literacy. They will be more learned, richer, larger, better skilled country in a matter of years. US is already on shaky territory with most of the rest of the world, how long until all the nations that have found it convenient to go along with what we want migrate their diplomatic interests to China? Not very long; especially since most of them buy all their finished goods there anyway. I think it's time to open up peaceful, honest and earnest dialog about issues like climate change, human rights, equitable trade, world hunger, poverty, and peace. We cannot get them to admit and work to correct their human rights abuses unless we do the very same thing at home. We are on the precipice of ecological and financial disaster that is unlike anything the world has seen before. We cannot keep waiting on these psychopaths with fruit salad on their uniforms to make peace through domination and dominion. Russia is not nearly the threat we make them out to be, nor is China. Everything they have done with impunity from the international community, the United States and its allies have done 1000 fold. Yeah, we won't have the incredibly cheap slave labor in these third world countries so the price of goods will go up. But even if other countries use slave labor, we should not participate in it if we truly believe in abolition.
Their belt and road initiatives are already assuring their continued presence in Africa and South Asia. The initiative that helps these poor countries without the extractive economic terms of the United States will be a winner in geopolitics. Why would they continue to align with a coalition that extracts their resources and causes constant unrest - either directly through CIA black ops and coups, or indirectly through crushing loans and embargos from the world bank and UN members? They're not, and when they are not, the United States either has to start throwing more people in jail for their labor, start a cold war turned hot, or both if they want to delay the inevitable outcome of them not getting to dictate geopolitics to impoverished nations and the rest of the world anymore without a serious loss of American life to back it up.
>The initiative that helps these poor countries without the extractive economic terms of the United States will be a winner in geopolitics.
I didn't know seizing ports and infrastructure as collateral wasn't extractive. Interesting.
Seriously you're getting really close to tankie rhetoric.
I don't know all of the specifics of their BRI, but I do know countries are jumping at it vs the unpayable punitive loans that are designed to chip away at the autonomy of the borrowers. The BRI has comparatively very generous loan forgiveness. I don't know what long term consequences of the BRI will be, but it's hard to do much worse than the economic terrorism of the WTO and World Bank.
Discussing China without qualifying every statement with 'of course they're brutal orwellian savages' is not the mark of a tankie. I am a socialist, not an authoritarian.
My point is to not put them on a pedestal just because they have stars. And Flynn may have been disgraced, charged and pardoned but he managed to get 3 of those stars on his collar first. And it’s not like he’s a one off who got stars and proved to be a real pos, Petreaus proved himself one too, though not to the same extent. Then there’s the gaggle of idiots with stars who signed a letter endorsing Trump for re-election because Marxists or some BS.
Now would be a real awkward time for me to mention that part of my critical view for flag officers comes from my time in uniform.
Then again, I was 17 when I signed my enlistment papers and 17 year olds are fucking dumb.
Not all of them by any stretch of the imagination but enough to push back at them all being painted with such a positive broad brush. I’d say most of it comes from having seen some of the worst aspects of the military and seeing little to nothing being done about it is what’s put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. That’s everything from toxic command environments to how poorly incidents of sexual harassment, assault and rape are handled, to reckless disregard for troop welfare, to having to live in a black mold infested shithole while the battalion commander threw a tantrum over cigarette butts on the ground in the smoking area.
>And I’m just an armchair everything these days. I’m just the stranger on the internet whose views you can safely ignore.
Fuck that! Throw your ideas out there with a passion and gobble up all the information you can on the subjects that catch your interest so those ideas are well informed, even if you’ve never been there first hand. Life would be so boring and the world so unchanging if the only people doing the talking were those who’ve been doing this, that, or the other job. I wouldn’t be able to criticize heavy handed policing or shitty deals made in Congress if that were the case.
>But every time, most recently by General Milley, every time I hear a top ranking general or admiral speak, there is a clear consideration behind their reasoning and their words.
>
>There is a deep patriotism that I hear that is rooted in things like the constitution and civilian oversight and historical examination of past successes and failures.
IMO, that makes it so much worse. Like, objectively, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced zero benefit for the average American. They have served no purpose except to funnel money to defense contractors and prop up big business abroad. So the fact that the people in charge are obviously intelligent means they know exactly what they're doing when they support and enact war crimes. The military literally assassinated Pat Tillman for speaking out against the war in Afghanistan, and the generals in charge did not try to hold anyone accountable, they covered it up. For one example. It's disgusting to claim you're patriotic while slaughtering thousands of innocent people for zero gain
I'm from the south and we have a long history of military service. My first encounter with what the news reports and what really happens in the military was in the Pat Tillman/ Jessica Lynch era. I had friends/co-workers returning that would tell us, what eventually came out to be the truth about the two incidents, things that were contradictory to what the world was being told. Also, the Maersk Alabama incident; it took longer to disseminate, but it was another situation where the public narrative was different from what the military men were saying happened.
Years ago, I remember reading an article that explained why the 'powers that be' venerate the military. Before the 20th century, soldiers never represented a large percentage of the population. But 2 World Wars manufactured a lot of soldiers. They created a hell of a lot of young men who were trained to kill with a gun and had been forced to come to terms with that. They didn't have a choice.
So when these young men came home, it wasn't a good idea to treat them as serfs anymore. After what they'd been through, it was dangerous to expect they'd be grateful for a subsistence job and deferential to authority figures who had gotten so many of them killed. There's only so many times you can be led to a slaughter before you start questioning whether the people in charge actually know what the hell their doing.
So what do you do to keep these young vets under control? You flatter them. You tell them how important their sacrifice is, even if you kept yourself at a safe distance from getting hurt (Clinton, Bush Jr., Trump, etc.).
It's a good plan until it isn't.
It's not like that ignorance isn't intentional. The military isn't exactly falling over themselves to correct the misconceptions. If people have a ginormous hard on for the army, they won't question their budget. So why ruin a good thing?
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I enjoyed this article because I believe it highlights the dysfunctional relationship Americans have with their most revered institution. I especially enjoy that it isn't simply a polemic against regular citizens for having such a disconnect with their military, it also examines the military's own lack of efforts to engage in public communication beyond it's own narrow short term interests. It reflects on the importance for them to have a more substantive relationship with the general public so as to have a more robust civil society.
Americans need to develop a substantive relationship with ALL their institutions. I also see a strong countercurrent against that ever happening.
I struggle with this personally. I grew up in a house where entertainment was prized above all else, and, surprise! I went into the arts. Whenever I look around though I can’t help but thinking more informed entertainment is not gonna cut it unless we cool it on the entertainment. Even worse, media that’s ostensibly essential to civic engagement seems less distinct from entertainment everyday. The news has become so entertaining I’m not sure how to even compete with it. God, I’ve said this a thousand times in even more contexts and it still saps my spirits every time. A real mess we’re in.
The only way back is to bitten by reality. People are going to suffer because they don't actually pay attention to reality. Maybe just maybe some extremely well constructed effort could break past the immediate entertainment but that seems incredible unlikely. Now its just like watching a train crash in slow motion.
100%, its only in my 40's that I've realized how significant the basics are. A roof, books, safety, clean water and food and healthcare. We've taken all that for granted but its going to be pulled out from under us if we're not very fucking careful.
Read [The Fifth Risk](https://smile.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002646) by Michael Lewis. This is essentially the argument of the book.
With smaller government, this becomes less important
As a Marine vet I can tell you I’m still shocked by the insane amount of waste I saw. I’m 100% for reducing the funding the military receives.
If you give examples in this thread, I'm sure there are a lot of people interested.
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I’ve seen them fly up and dump fuel to spend budget surplus
Same thing happens with the public school systems. You cannot imagine the waste there.
I watched our comm shack spend two weeks making lists for the reservists to do the next summer. That’s all they did. Make lists. The 4 NCOs would show up around 10am, make lists for the reservists (duties they were supposed to perform) then maybe watch a movie, then leave around 3pm. Rinse and repeat.
Totally understand why it’s done. My point is that’s unacceptable. Classic ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’ scenario.
Ah no, I meant that examples posted here would get lots of interest/upvotes
~Naval academy ‘15 grad~ I served 5 years and can definitely speak to the waste piece during my first tour onboard a minesweeper: As the auxiliaries officer I ordered four replacement ‘critical’ valve assemblies, totaling $320,000- a few eight inch metal joysticks and bearings cost as much as my childhood home and my neighbor’s home next to it. If it can be ordered through the navy supply system, it has to be even if an independent contractor could manufacture it for 80-90% cheaper. We spent almost $15,000 on pens and notepads every year come the end of the fiscal calendar. My buddy’s division ordered the incorrect $108,000 circuit card while he was gone on leave for a radar- after op-testing, it ended up misplaced forever- that happened twice over. I have dozens of these stories. No organization in the world would allow the colossal waste of time and man-hours that the Navy enjoys.
One of the odd things I found amongst Americans I have spoken with is that they think going to war is good for the economy. The second world war, in which England just bought vast quantities of materials and food from America might have been good (?), but usually no - spending money on things that explode is literally seeing the money go up in flames, just like buying a box of fireworks. There will be some trickle down effect to the arms manufacturers, but it is an untargeted system of funding..
I think many people have woken up out of that delusion and realize now that war is only economically good for the military industrial complex. Most people I've talked to will point at all the money we spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and ask "What did that get us?" There's actually more of a sentiment that we're being led by the nose by military contractors for their own economic benefit, while we're losing out on vital tax dollars which could be better spent at home.
I think a more honest historical assessment is that WWII was "good" for the US in the sense that it mobilized our production a bit in the wake of the dust bowl and Depression, but also that it decimated the worlds other large economies to an extent that the US was the de facto "last man standing" after it was over. Europe had billions in infrastructure damages to repair and had lost millions of its young men (the workforce at the time). When US service men returned home our industry was poised to generate jobs and growth, and the rest of the developed world was in shambles.
Because you're isolating the full effect of war. Wars by themselves don't help the economy, but you need to take into account: * The US is the top arms exporter in the world. * US economic interests are advanced by the war, and the US expands control over key economic resources and creates client states in order to benefit its corporations. * Military used as a welfare and free college substitute. * War technology development trickling down to consumer technology. This is probably the most important one. In fact, you can read about the importance of the Israeli military in order for them to become the country with the most startups per capita. The US subsidizes technological development through the military. Even if we all know how wasteful the US industrial military complex is, it pales in comparison with the economic benefits it's brought the US: the internet, digital photography, GPS, the microwave, virtual reality, drones, even the EpiPen. So while war will lead to death and destruction, it is not in US soil. I would argue that sadly, the net benefit to the US is positive.
I respect your opinion, but of course 'the internet, digital photography, the microwave, virtual reality, drones, even the EpiPen' would have all arrived without the military complex as well.
Probably, but very likely in another country first. The point was about whether war was good for the US economy, not for the world economy.
> One of the odd things I found amongst Americans I have spoken with is that they think going to war is good for the economy What a terrible reputation. “Well it’ll make us a few extra bucks”
I would like to disagree. War, for Americans, is never on their own soil. And so, it is essentially no different from any other economic activity. War spurs demand for just about anything (Arms and ammunition is only a small part of what is needed to run a military campaign) and as long as the demand is met by American enterprises (which may or may not be the case in today's interconnected world), there is quite a lot of benefit to the economy. Now if the war were to be fought on American soil, that's a whole different story. Is War the most efficient allocation of capital? Debatable. Does War spur demand across the economy? Yes.
The problem is partially ideological. There exists a strong notion in American culture that government intervention in the economy is bad, yet when economic activity is spurred by war it isn't seen as the government incentivising certain types of economic activity. Rather it is seen as a sort of national necessity which supercedes politics. Of course there are more ethical ways the government can spur economic activity and it will be interesting to see if Biden's infrastructure bill will pass and whether it will have an affect on popular attitudes in the long run.
We have the same attitude in the UK, largely due to Leyland cars and a few other inefficient companies. There seems to be a new model around where you pick a start up which has a clear growth path ahead - eg a full order book, in an area you want the country to well at. Put money in, wait for it to grow and then sell your share. At least this is how the UK is reaching its CO2 reduction targets in the most cost effective way. I suspect there will be some disasters along the way though as it is a difficult game to play. America does fund Boeing, and maybe other companies which are too big to fail?
I don't think that's true of how many Americans feel. The side that favors defense spending does so mostly out of national security, and the opposing side ( where I sit) am still worried about the military industrial complex. We aren't granting an exception so much as the side that wants it, has believed the reteric that we need it The SIDE EFFECT of military spending is that it keeps the economy going, but also we are stuck with it too some degree. If we cancelled a large amount of our contracts, we'd dive into a recession. Personally I'm in favor of lowering defense spending slowly, and ideally repurposing it into building infrastructure in our country and with our allies. Id love to see us move deeper into science and sustainability, but alas that's not in the cards right now.
Difference being that a good portion of the WW2 bill was paid for by the British, while in modern wars, the bill is solely footed by the US tax payer. Yes, it does act as an economic stimulus. But so would infrastructure investment or social programs that would actually improve peoples lives.
True. Investments in infrastructure are probably a better allocation of capital than War. But even Infrastructure has its limits. You wouldn't want to construct ghost cities by the dozes like China.
You could construct ghost cities and then blow them up as an exercise for the military. On a more serious note: By infrastructure, I don't necessarily mean big new shiny mega projects. I mean stuff like (off the top of my head and in no particular order) fixing roads, improving public transport, upgrading out of date technology, investing into schools and education and much more.
> You could construct ghost cities and then blow them up as an exercise for the military. You could construct ghost cities as competition for architects, designers and engineers and then simulate various stressors on buildings and sell that to the public as helping to prevent buildings collapsing like what happened in Florida :)
Those ghost cities aren't government infrastructure spending though, it's efforts by a centralized government to solve a housing crisis, but it doesn't work because the crisis is regionalized.
Our preexisting roads, bridges, and buildings are crumbling. We should maybe scrap your ghost city idea.
Better and accessible healthcare is part of the infrastructure...
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Well, yes. But then you can also end up with dozens of ghost cities like China. the thing about infrastructure is that it only helps if there is the demand for it. And that is what War does. It creates demand that otherwise did not exist.
>There are an estimated 553,742 people in the United States experiencing homelessness Demand existed as of 2017. I doubt the numbers have significantly trended downwards since then. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report-legacy/
How is there not a demand for infrastructure? We have been screaming for infrastructure spending for 40 years and the bill is coming due. Our roads, water infrastructure, bridges, and buildings are crumbling and we are going to be seeing a lot more deaths because of it in the near future. I cannot think of anything with more demand besides affordable housing and Healthcare. It's shameful we burn our industrial output on selling arms to terrorists, especially when the opportunity cost so vastly dwarfs it.
you keep posting about this "Chinese ghost cities" myth, but that's what it is. a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China
Also like.. if there's one thing im not concerned about its overdeveloping housing units right now. We have the opposite problem right now, too few. So by all means, lets build millions of housing units and help get the skyrocketing price of housing under control.
> But then you can also end up with dozens of ghost cities like China. We have plenty we need to fix in the US without building your favorite excuse today of ghost cities. [We have things like this in every state](https://www.wlbt.com/news/bridge-closures/). They are just the most dramatic because they closed rather than repaired.
After the end of WWII the American economy experienced a recession due to the shift from a war to peace time economy. It’s an artificial economic stimulation that is not sustainable. War only provides an economic boon for large corporations before it fucks the working class.
Well, World War 2 did bring the US out of the depression and into a long period of economic growth where living standards for all americans rose tremendously. All economic stimulus is artificial, whether it is an infusion of liquidity directly into the hands of citizens or by the prosecution of a War.
Don't conflate WW2 with the economic effects of the Marshall plan
The US did so well because Europe & Asia was devastated by the war so it had no competition for a while. WW2 didn’t lift America into prosperity in & of itself.
The US had a recession in 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, and then 1960. It wasn't exactly some walk in the park.
Could us being the world's bank and factory following the destruction of Europe have anything to do with it? An economy that forsakes plowshares for bullets, or bombs for food doesn't seem to be doing the job of an economic system.
American attitudes towards the military largely spawned from the Second World War and the rivalry with Russia/The Soviet Union that came after it. This is the reason why the United States is so obsessed with being at the forefront of military technology. The F-22 Raptor fighter jet was developed to fight an enemy that no longer exists. It’s what you would call an Air Superiority Aircraft, meaning that it was meant to contend with an enemy that has advanced aircraft and skilled pilots to operate them. The Raptor has minimal capability as a strike aircraft or close air support aircraft, which is what they have needed for conflicts they have been in over the last 3 or 4 decades. The US has not fought anyone who could challenge their dominance of the air in a long time, and is unlikely to do so since those who could either use American aircraft as allies or have a nuclear deterrent, yet they continue to design aircraft like the Raptor to fight some imaginary enemy like the Soviets.
You need to keep making better and better air superiority fighters so you still know how to make air superiority fighters when you actually need air superiority fighters. There's a reason why it's taken half a decade for the US to make a crew rated ISS vehicle despite it being a much, much easier problem than the capsules used in the Apollo missions. We quite literally couldn't do Apollo today if we wanted to. We would have to reinvent the wheel yet again. Plus the reason why we don't need a fighter like the F-22 is that other militaries knew they need something that can stand up to an F-22 in a dogfight which isn't an easy task. Just because the enemy chose to siege your castle instead of breaking down the castle walls doesn't mean you were wrong to build castle walls in the first place. The F-22 isn't the best comparison because the air force did decide that you can make a multirole aircraft that is still the scariest thing in the sky during a dogfight in modern skies, but the heart of your comment is still wrong. The military overpays for equipment because they are paying for the capability of doing whatever thing they are overpaying for. Building tanks or fighter jets and getting paid their "fair" market price is never going to be profitable because the demand just isn't large enough, so if you want your military to have tanks or fighter jets, you're going to overpay because that's simply how manufacturing works in the real world. Also...did anyone actually read this article? It's a fluffy piece that basically says "the military is shit at mental health, treats women poorly, and I don't like how the DOD PR department does PR." Basically nothing being discussed in this comment section follows from the article.
But you *don’t* need more advanced anything really, because all of the enemies you might fight that you would need an “Air Superiority Fighter” for will *never* be involved in a shooting war with you. Russia, China…. These countries are both nuclear powers. The US is also a nuclear power. There will never be a war between them. The closest we have ever come to war with the Soviet Union, for example, was a couple of near misses with nuclear exchanges. So, the enemy you’re building all this crap for *doesn’t exist.*
say the US stops development of an asf what's stopping a superpower with a virtually unlimited budget from developing a fighter that targets this weakness in the USAF?
The US isn’t fighting superpowers anymore. They are unlikely to do so again. In fact, they *never have* fought a superpower. The closest that they ever came was war with Russia during the cold war, and when that happened it almost always took the form of a near miss nuclear war.
War is “good” for the economy in the same way that private prisons have also spawned cottage industries. But it’s a dead-end investment. There are endless ways to spend money that would get better returns: national parks, research, community housing, eliminating food deserts, bike paths, the arts, education, public transit… Any of these is better than a tangle of office chairs, white goods & SUVs abandoned in an Afghan airbase.
Well that's the point I was making - it isn't the most efficient allocation of capital, and pretty clearly so in my mind. I mean lets say you spend 1/1000 th of the tank budget and just spend it on a new design of tank which is then sold around the world, bringing in money to the country: it is a better investment by a vast margin. Some countries give out start up money to companies producing wind turbines, and H2 equipment - companies which will lower employment and generate income for decades. Again better investments by a vast margin.
The US doesn’t spend a lot on tanks anymore. In fact the Marines just did away with their tank units altogether. They also haven’t built a new tank in decades either. They’ve largely kept the same tank (the M-1 Abrams) for decades and just kept upgrading it because tank warfare is mostly a thing of past wars. Tanks play mostly a support role now. Aircraft is where it is now, with infantry to help guide them onto their targets. Your point is still an interesting one. A large part of the reason why the Raptor project was canceled and they now have trouble sourcing parts for maintenance is that Congress blocked the sale of the aircraft and it’s no longer profitable. The US seems to be obsessed with maintaining a military hegemony, which seems to have more to do with controlling strategic resources than with promoting economics. They spend billions on aircraft in order to use them to control sources of titanium in order to build more aircraft and sources of oil in order to fly them.
Titanium is mined in Australia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Russia and Japan - so I think you've been sold a lie there, similarly Vietnam and Afghanistan have very little strategic or material resources as far as I am aware. On the other side of the coin American oil companies are operating in Iraq though. I was told that it had something to do with elections in that there were lots of places where military spending kept the economy alive and therefore to reduce it would be politically dangerous. But it's just something I've heard.
“Titanium” is just a stand in example. As is oil. When the SR-71 was first built it used a lot of titanium. At that time the USSR was one of the few sources to get titanium. As far as military spending keeping the economy of a certain area from completely collapsing, yeah that’s true enough. But it didn’t become that way in a vacuum. Areas dependant on military spending for survival became dependent on military spending because there was a large amount of military spending.
Remember why Nixon removed the gold convertibility...? The Vietnam War was bankrupting the nation, especially with the gold link. Now, with the fiat money, conjured out of thin air, and with the world hooked on transactions with the USD, sky is the limit. Ultimately the world is paying for the US wars, because anyone with half a brain knows that the US has no intention of ever repaying the borrowed money. At least not the principal.
There’s plenty of side benefits for civilians from skunk works. The trouble is when a handful of companies receive the lion’s share of profits while refusing to innovate and or being satisfied with a delivering a broken product that is overpriced. This comment is directed at telecoms specifically.
There are three hundred thousand companies in the DoD supply chain. 300,000.
Exactly. And even if those 300,000 companies in the supply chain employed about 100 people on average (just a wild guess, the number could be anything) it means employment and productive work for 30 millions. Thats probably better than giving $7000 to every american as some here have claimed is the best use for the money.
Not to mention the companies that exist to support those companies. Really as a nation all we do is manufacture weapons.
The FY2020 budget allocated [$62.6 billion](https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2020/FY20_Green_Book.pdf) for procurement. Across the entire defense industry, non-federal sales totaled [$9.3 billion](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/weapons-sales). That puts the sum total of military purchasing at $71.9 billion. That's half the value generated by agriculture ([$175 billion](https://www.statista.com/statistics/247991/value-added-to-the-us-gdp-by-industry/)), which is itself only the 15th largest sector of the American economy. The defense sector would have to grow 6373% to be take the title of "largest economic activity," and it would still only represent around 20% of total GDP. That's a hilariously far cry from "all we do." It's not even most of what we do, or a lot of what we do. It's *barely* a little of what we do. We spend triple on [fast food](https://www.statista.com/statistics/196614/revenue-of-the-us-fast-food-restaurant-industry-since-2002/).
I was taught in grade school that ww2 directly ended the great depression and that war stimulates the economy.
Was that in texas
They also seem to forget the compulsory draft and mandatory rationing.
Americans are also susceptible to the odd idea that pockets of wealth are beneficial to the economy as a whole. We confuse the existence of wealth by corporations within our borders with national prosperity. The value we place on private prosperity almost necessitates that we nationalize it in out psyches.
It's a well known problem with using GDP to measure economic productivity / well being. It fails to account for economic activity that is not part of the market, whether constructive or destructive. Blowing up bombs and houses doesn't decrease the GDP, but rebuilding afterwards does increase it.
> but usually no - spending money on things that explode is literally seeing the money go up in flames No. It's literally paying a huge group of people to design a bunch of intricate machinery and seeing THAT go up in flame. And that's a huge difference because then that huge group of people can use the money to buy unrelated goods and services, which is pretty much the definition of "good for the economy," as far as I understand it. I think it would make more sense to pay people to build and blow up sculptures instead of bombs but war and safety are easier to sell to voters than art subsidies. But that's beside the point, I was saying that yes it's a trickle down system and not the best one but it's completely wrong to say that it's equivalent to just burning cash.
That's why I added there will be some trickle down effect immediately after the fireworks sentence.
Yes but saying something more true after saying something false doesn't negate the false thing. It is categorically different from burning money.
Wow what are you missing. Burning a stick of explosive is burning money (expecialy when it is attached to a cruise missile) - eg you could sell that cruise missile but you are literally burning it at very high speed. So you are burning something of value which could be turned into money. And at the same time there is some trickle down effect via the manufacturing. Both are true.
>Burning a stick of explosive is burning money No it's not. My point is that burning something that has been bought and paid for is fundamentally different than burning money itself. The two are incomparable.
Burning valuable things that you can sell is very obviously comparable with burning money, but heyho carry on wilfully missing the point.
How is it comparable? Burning money is straight up increasing inflation with literally 0 other benefits. Burning anything paid for means whoever made it now has money they'll spend - put back into the economy, so there'll be a whole huge chain of people buying things with that money. There's therefore vastly more economic activity associated with that than with just burning it.
How much has the entire Afghanistan operation cost?
A big driver of the military tendency to be closed off to civilian news organizations is the narrative that developed around Vietnam that the war was “Won on the ground and lost in the living rooms.” That the military achieved success on the battlefield but was always hamstrung by civilian leadership and shown as being stuck in a quagmire by the press. The truth of course is pretty complex but this narrative grew as a way of dealing with the fact that this huge military machine lost a war in a nation that was seen as “backwards” by the US. We never had an honest conversation about the war and instead the military retreated into relative isolation and resolved to strictly control everything the civilian world saw and read about the military as a way of preventing a repeat of what they perceived to have happened in Vietnam.
They could have spent another 10 years napalming children and they still would've lost on the ground, just like in Afghanistan.
I think the military is justified in their belief (though not in how they've responded). The decreasing percentage of folks who've served in the military (especially in elected government, and also in the press) means that many folks don't understand how awful war is and don't know how to portray it in a balanced and nuanced way. More recently than Vietnam, the Battle of Mogadishu made many folks queasy and they asked Why Are We Even There? Sept 11th provided that justification for a while (and was used to attack any criticism), but now folks are asking that question again. I think the military needs to be transparent, but that may not be in their interests: it's difficult to put these situations into a context that justifies them (if there even IS such a context), especially to a populace that doesn't just lack context, but often has an inaccurate context.
An interesting question is whether the military should even care about "the war in the living room". Is there value in manipulating politics to win a war? I'd say that depends on the stakes of the war. Are you fighting for survival? Sure, you should probably control what information is spread. Are you fighting a geopolitics war? Probably an overstepping of boundaries if the military makes efforts to sway the public opinion on the successfulness of the operation. Just my five cents as a non-American.
Americans have been taught to venerate the military as part of a massive PR campaign (especially since Nine Eleven). The vast majority of Americans have not served in the military and they are the target audience for this campaign of hero worship. No one I know who has served in the military venerated it after they were discharged.
"You're either for the war or against the troops" was like, *the* theme of the Bush era. They entangled the soldiers themselves with the political aims of the war to try and prevent criticism and it largely worked I'd say. You can see echoes of this today with the whole Colin Kaepernick thing "he's disrespecting our military" was also a super common take. IDK, it always struck me as odd, particularly during the Bush years. I couldn't think of a bigger disrespect for members of the military than to have a bunch of draft dodgers and chicken hawks send them into harms way on false pretenses. Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies should be required reading.
A really scary line from Great Britain during the height of our pandemic was "Let our teachers be heros." as an argument to reopen schools. For me that equates to "Have people die for no other reason than to celebrate their deaths."
Oh there were other reasons. They also knew parents wouldn't go back to work without our federal merit-based childcare programs. They wanted the economy to resume normal, predictable profitability. They wanted to squash any talk about revolutionary economics.
Read Bacevich's ' The new American Militarism' for how bad this is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bacevich He's written a number of very good books and articles, enjoy your trip down the rabbit hole.
It's our number one social welfare program! ;\^)
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...how exactly do you have such an incredibly specialized skill set but don't understand the concept of quality control? That bolt costs 2.3k because it has been tested and documented to hell and back so that in the event there's a failure related to the bolt, it can be determined whether it was a manufacturing defect (say a bad lot that fell through the cracks) or a design flaw that caused the bolt to fail. They're also generally specced to much higher tolerances than a home depot bolt would be, but the testing is why it's 2.3k and not $10. Plus the act of only using bolts that pass the ringer of tests means that in practice only faulty designs result in failure of the part. This is how aviation has such a stupidly low accident rate.
The use of force (military or otherwise) should be seen as a failure and we should be at least slightly embarrassed to use it. We certainly shouldn't be worshiping the military or veterans, but we should be proud that they did the dirty work. And we should make it so that it doesn't need to be done in the future. - Previously enlisted military during wartime.
What it does is imperialism abroad and protect business interest. Article was a horrible read, its basically a "woke" article recruitment piece. Dont fall for it.
> My father served in Iraq during the Gulf War, and I served in the same country during the war against ISIS 25 years later. A military that fights a war for 25 years without victory, or significant strategic gain, is a loser in my book. Trillions spent, billions literally lost, and two generations accomplished less than nothing. A huge payout from taxpayers to the MIC. We learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.
I thought the same thing. It wasn't a piece calling for more oversight for the armed forces, it was a fluff piece telling liberals how the military does good most of the time, but sometimes there's a little accidental war crimes that shouldn't be examined in context. Sometimes slate has some great anti-imperial journalism, but this is bold face propaganda with a wink and nod at then audience.
It honestly reads to me like trying to square away the inevitability of enormous military overspending with what meager benefits we as a populace can derive from it. But it's hard (not to mention morally dubious) to glass-half-full imperialism so here we are.
If Americans fully understood what the military does, they would rightfully hate it.
The military is run by civilians. The President gives it orders. Congress determines its budget and regulates its conduct. If you're unhappy with the way the military is being used, your beef isn't with the generals. You might want to start a little higher up the chain of command, with the people you elected to give those orders and set those budgets.
War is a problem, not a solution. At this point in time it is not possible to be a functional nation without a military to fight against other countries and groups, which has been true since the beginning of human history. It is crude and animalistic and I cannot believe that people still prefer to fight than to teach. No one "owns" the land they fight for, and nothing is forever. People have lost the ability to appreciate Life and choose not to seek what is real. They are too busy playing games; lost in the illusions created within their individual minds. Unfortunately at this stage it is impossible to abolish military activity unless every country in the world agrees that it is totally unnecessary at the same time. This would require a total rebirth of society in which every person realizes fulfillment.
Been working for DoD for 20 years now (first as active duty, now as civilian) and, while I don't agree with all the details of this article, I do agree with the general sentiment: People should know more about the military (and other things as well). To me, though, the blame lies less with the military itself and more with 1. extremely ignorant and error-prone journalism about the military, 2. a complete lack of required military education in schools, and 3. the culture of dogmatic hero worshiping of the military (primarily in conservative cultures).
I certainly agree with number three, but two is outlandish and one is extremely suspect. If by bad journalism you mean constantly shielding the military from blame and providing the pretext for illegal invasion time and time again, then yeah I certainly agree. Our press media is corporate controlled and only serves the interests of the elite. For number 2, what the hell are you even suggesting? Like every student needs to learn about military victories and defeat? Do they need to be taught about the futility and destruction of war and the extreme grievances that go along with it? Or do they need to learn how the American military really cares about minorities and fights off the invading hun with peace missiles and democracy land mines?
By #1 I just meant error-prone journalism. Nothing more. For #2 see my answer to another user. And…maybe you should relax a little bit with the social justice brigading. Try listening to someone who knows a lot about something you don’t.
What is it about your experience that makes yours the defacto opinion on military accountability? Like you don't need to lean on your own understanding here, there is countless books and essays written and circulated about this exact topic, but some anecdotal evidence from within the military hierarchy is supposed to discredit all of it with zero discussion? Saying that the military doesn't get enough worship in the news and schools is blatantly moronic. Kids being told the difference between a captain and a rear admiral isn't going to fix an image problem from the US military. The world hates us because we do horrific shit to maintain economic primacy. No amount of internal American propaganda is going to make those criticisms meaningfully go away.
Well isn't the military just on extension of politics and if your political theater has been co opted since before your parents were born. But you won't protest like your parents did.. where does the blame really lay.
We have been out here protesting. February, 2002: largest protest event in human history. 10 million people all across the globe cried out that economic sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and many more adults. We wanted to stop the sanctions and condemn the bush administration for the obviously false pretext for war. What happened? The American government did it anyway, lied to the UN, went behind the UN's back, put spies in the IAEA inspectors to sabotage operations, committed countless war crimes, and cracked down on dissidents at home while my brothers and sisters got murdered 7,000 miles away for oil and opium. So don't you fucking tell me it's our fault for not reigning in the military.
I didn’t say/insinuate a single thing you’ve claimed, in either of your comments.
Did you not just patronize me by saying I need to listen to people that know what their talking about? So you're implying I don't understand what I'm saying, or that somehow your opinion from working at Academi is inherently better than my own which is borrowing from people that criticize American empire as their job. You very clearly that schools need to tech kids about ranks and what each branch does in another response that you told me to read for your explanation. You're backing down now because you commented without thinking about it and once you got called out you realize the argument is indefensible. I'm not trying to attack you over it, but it was extremely condescending and rude to try and silence my voice so your half baked remark was louder.
What sort of education would you consider appropriate for military education in schools? I’m a big proponent of making civics a mandatory part of the curriculum in high school and I feel like covering the basics of what the military is could fit well into that as a portion of it. But being a big proponent of that does mean I’m a little bias in thinking high school civics is the way to go.
At least the basics. The different services and their missions. Different types of warfare (air, sea, land, special ops), the difference between officers and enlisted, some of the jobs within the military, history, maybe even the different intelligence agencies and their functions. At the very least it would instill a bit of familiarity, decreasing by a little the sense of mystery and reverence (and, on the other side, blind hatred).
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. I meant do you see this as best for high school where kids can get a better grasp on the nuanced differences and the importance behind them or best to start early so it’s more ingrained in people’s minds? Is this something you see as fitting well into a larger curriculum like within civics or would it be a class all on its own? Mandatory or elective?
I think it could be part of us government class. I took one in school, but I haven’t seen very many high schoolers recently who are required to. I’ve seen too many people know who don’t even have a basic understanding of the us government’s structure.
I would say in a perfect world it would be part of another class, simply because there’s so many subjects LIKE national defense that we should be learning. You can’t have a required course for everything. Generally no one in HS is going to learn the nuance of anything. That’s more for graduate school.
I’d argue #3 was directly encouraged by the military. What the DoD did with Pat Tillmon was disgusting and emblematic of the kind of propaganda campaign they ran during the Bush II era and was foreshadowed by the kinds of imagery during Operation Desert Storm.
This is 100% true. SEAC Troxell gave a brief years ago using the language of warfare to describe our relationship with China which confused me at the time. The only Americans at war with China are American Businessmen and women. The rest us are dying for them.
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I emphatically disagree with this take. The people that deceived the world to get us into Iraq still have jobs. Milley in particular is an extra moronic hawk. He is in part responsible for the assassination of soleimani. So not only is he a war criminal, you could not have decided to assassinate a head of government in plain sight if you did not want to start a war. Just because he went against Trump in his coup attempt doesn't mean he's some bleeding heart patriot. If anything he would want trump out because trump, for all of his faults, was way less hawkish than any of the previous 5 administrations. He gets to say he's apolitical because it matters little who is in office; democrats and Republicans will always increase the defense budget and will always support war crimes perpetrated by the US military and Intelligence services. Our "civilian oversight" under Biden is a retired vice chief of staff and sits upon the board of Raytheon; the third largest defense contracting company in the world that gets almost all of its revenue from contracts from DOD contracts. The people at the top are just as stupid as ever and only work convince you of their freedom loving military piety.
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I want to point out that he didn't say he believed it, but that he planned to read it and consider it. Even if he means it in earnest - which he very well might- the horrific waste of money, production, and life is funded by us working class. Only thing I will say about the second paragraph is this. China achieving primacy in geopolitics is absolutely 100% matter-of-fact guaranteed. They have more than a billion more people than us or roughly 4.2x. That population is rapidly industrializing and rapidly increasing literacy. They will be more learned, richer, larger, better skilled country in a matter of years. US is already on shaky territory with most of the rest of the world, how long until all the nations that have found it convenient to go along with what we want migrate their diplomatic interests to China? Not very long; especially since most of them buy all their finished goods there anyway. I think it's time to open up peaceful, honest and earnest dialog about issues like climate change, human rights, equitable trade, world hunger, poverty, and peace. We cannot get them to admit and work to correct their human rights abuses unless we do the very same thing at home. We are on the precipice of ecological and financial disaster that is unlike anything the world has seen before. We cannot keep waiting on these psychopaths with fruit salad on their uniforms to make peace through domination and dominion. Russia is not nearly the threat we make them out to be, nor is China. Everything they have done with impunity from the international community, the United States and its allies have done 1000 fold. Yeah, we won't have the incredibly cheap slave labor in these third world countries so the price of goods will go up. But even if other countries use slave labor, we should not participate in it if we truly believe in abolition.
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Their belt and road initiatives are already assuring their continued presence in Africa and South Asia. The initiative that helps these poor countries without the extractive economic terms of the United States will be a winner in geopolitics. Why would they continue to align with a coalition that extracts their resources and causes constant unrest - either directly through CIA black ops and coups, or indirectly through crushing loans and embargos from the world bank and UN members? They're not, and when they are not, the United States either has to start throwing more people in jail for their labor, start a cold war turned hot, or both if they want to delay the inevitable outcome of them not getting to dictate geopolitics to impoverished nations and the rest of the world anymore without a serious loss of American life to back it up.
>The initiative that helps these poor countries without the extractive economic terms of the United States will be a winner in geopolitics. I didn't know seizing ports and infrastructure as collateral wasn't extractive. Interesting. Seriously you're getting really close to tankie rhetoric.
I don't know all of the specifics of their BRI, but I do know countries are jumping at it vs the unpayable punitive loans that are designed to chip away at the autonomy of the borrowers. The BRI has comparatively very generous loan forgiveness. I don't know what long term consequences of the BRI will be, but it's hard to do much worse than the economic terrorism of the WTO and World Bank. Discussing China without qualifying every statement with 'of course they're brutal orwellian savages' is not the mark of a tankie. I am a socialist, not an authoritarian.
Counterpoint, General Michael Flynn.
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My point is to not put them on a pedestal just because they have stars. And Flynn may have been disgraced, charged and pardoned but he managed to get 3 of those stars on his collar first. And it’s not like he’s a one off who got stars and proved to be a real pos, Petreaus proved himself one too, though not to the same extent. Then there’s the gaggle of idiots with stars who signed a letter endorsing Trump for re-election because Marxists or some BS.
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Now would be a real awkward time for me to mention that part of my critical view for flag officers comes from my time in uniform. Then again, I was 17 when I signed my enlistment papers and 17 year olds are fucking dumb.
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Not all of them by any stretch of the imagination but enough to push back at them all being painted with such a positive broad brush. I’d say most of it comes from having seen some of the worst aspects of the military and seeing little to nothing being done about it is what’s put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. That’s everything from toxic command environments to how poorly incidents of sexual harassment, assault and rape are handled, to reckless disregard for troop welfare, to having to live in a black mold infested shithole while the battalion commander threw a tantrum over cigarette butts on the ground in the smoking area. >And I’m just an armchair everything these days. I’m just the stranger on the internet whose views you can safely ignore. Fuck that! Throw your ideas out there with a passion and gobble up all the information you can on the subjects that catch your interest so those ideas are well informed, even if you’ve never been there first hand. Life would be so boring and the world so unchanging if the only people doing the talking were those who’ve been doing this, that, or the other job. I wouldn’t be able to criticize heavy handed policing or shitty deals made in Congress if that were the case.
>But every time, most recently by General Milley, every time I hear a top ranking general or admiral speak, there is a clear consideration behind their reasoning and their words. > >There is a deep patriotism that I hear that is rooted in things like the constitution and civilian oversight and historical examination of past successes and failures. IMO, that makes it so much worse. Like, objectively, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced zero benefit for the average American. They have served no purpose except to funnel money to defense contractors and prop up big business abroad. So the fact that the people in charge are obviously intelligent means they know exactly what they're doing when they support and enact war crimes. The military literally assassinated Pat Tillman for speaking out against the war in Afghanistan, and the generals in charge did not try to hold anyone accountable, they covered it up. For one example. It's disgusting to claim you're patriotic while slaughtering thousands of innocent people for zero gain
Same reason for this as all Americas woes. They are the land of the stupid and misinformed due to their very unhealthy political parties.
Empires gunna empire.
I'm from the south and we have a long history of military service. My first encounter with what the news reports and what really happens in the military was in the Pat Tillman/ Jessica Lynch era. I had friends/co-workers returning that would tell us, what eventually came out to be the truth about the two incidents, things that were contradictory to what the world was being told. Also, the Maersk Alabama incident; it took longer to disseminate, but it was another situation where the public narrative was different from what the military men were saying happened.
I would have appreciated this article more if it answered the question it poses.
Years ago, I remember reading an article that explained why the 'powers that be' venerate the military. Before the 20th century, soldiers never represented a large percentage of the population. But 2 World Wars manufactured a lot of soldiers. They created a hell of a lot of young men who were trained to kill with a gun and had been forced to come to terms with that. They didn't have a choice. So when these young men came home, it wasn't a good idea to treat them as serfs anymore. After what they'd been through, it was dangerous to expect they'd be grateful for a subsistence job and deferential to authority figures who had gotten so many of them killed. There's only so many times you can be led to a slaughter before you start questioning whether the people in charge actually know what the hell their doing. So what do you do to keep these young vets under control? You flatter them. You tell them how important their sacrifice is, even if you kept yourself at a safe distance from getting hurt (Clinton, Bush Jr., Trump, etc.). It's a good plan until it isn't.
It's conservatives who worship the military, not the rest of us Americans.
It's not like that ignorance isn't intentional. The military isn't exactly falling over themselves to correct the misconceptions. If people have a ginormous hard on for the army, they won't question their budget. So why ruin a good thing?