Hacker News Reader

Comment by omegaham | Hacker News Reader

You would have to gut social programs to pay for it, which people may or may not be okay with.

Just to provide some numbers - the USAF's budget is $170 billion per year. For comparison, that's about the cost of Britain's entire NHS. A very large amount of that goes to airlift capability - plenty of money is spent on air superiority, but the USAF's primary mission in this era of asymmetric warfare is logistical support.

Basically, the attitude of most European governments is "If the US is willing to pay for it, why should we reject their help?"

View on HN

> You would have to gut social programs to pay for it

Probably not that much. We need defense force, we don't need to "police" the world (which really means imperialism). We don't need nuclear capabilities.

Also, the relation between defense and social spending is tenuous at best. Both scale linearly with the size of the economy. Defense spending can actually be beneficial in creating jobs and improving technology.

>Probably not that much. We need defense force, we don't need to "police" the world (which really means imperialism). We don't need nuclear capabilities.

It's not us you'll have to convince of this, it's your government. They tend to be a bit prickly about such things, no matter how enlightened the general populace is.

Maybe this should get brought up every time the Internet scoffs at America's weak social programs.

This is one of the reasons why leftists are pretty much universally for massive cuts in military spending. Which makes sense - you can't have both.

The Europeans would have to cut their own social programs if they wanted to do any peacekeeping / humanitarian aid operations - all of that is contingent on American logistical support. Hell, my guess is that they would castigate a more leftist, benign American government; it would make things a hell of a lot harder for a lot of people.

Lefists? Is that what we are now, leftists and hawks?

I'm a liberal, and I'd take massive cuts at the war department even without re spending it all on entitlements.

And we don't need such a huge military for humanitarian work either.

Not sure I'm getting the connection. Doesn't the Strategic Airlift Capability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Airlift_Capability have 3 planes?

Is the cost for that 4.5 x higher than Delta Air Lines annual revenue? ($37.7 billion 2013)

I'm sure most of the cost of USAF is on other things...

The US operates 5,638 military aircraft, including 222 C-17A Globemasters, 261 C-130H Hercules planes, and 104 C-130Js.

The Strategic Airlift Capability has 3 C-17s.

The SAC is, frankly, a symbolic gesture to say, "Yes, we're going to include everyone." The bulk of the heavy lifting is done by standard USAF planes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com