Why the Piloted Flight Speed Record Hasn’t Been Broken in 50 Years
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Evidently the design of aircraft that can fly above the piloted flight speed record is available, and it can be made safe enough (ok, 2 space shuttles exploded but with further development can be made safer)
I agree that it's a matter of political and economic will, and the introduction of the unpiloted drone changes the picture, but at least for the time that the space shuttle was in operation, humans piloted aircraft for much faster than the official speed record.
Here's some good jumping off points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vehicle_speed_records
Sure it's fast, but nobody's sure if it flies.
You can't dispute that the Shuttle is "Powered" on the way up. It's piloted by computers, ok - but near the end of the way up I'm sure the flight commander has control over his own aircraft.
The only reason the Shuttle is not counted is technicalities of space flight vs "flight" vs aircraft vs spacecraft, even though the shuttle operates in both air and space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
It's not like the good old days when they'd just drop old ones in the ocean.[1]
[1]http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/10/08/millions-unexploded-b...
For many countries, including some major powers, published military budgets are a catch-all category for a variety of developmental and administrative expenses - public works, colonial administration, development of the merchant marine, construction, and improvement of harbor and navigational facilities, transportation of civilian personnel, and the delivery of mail - of dubious military relevance.
Israel is an unusual circumstance, in that it's surrounded by hostile countries, but so is the U.S. We de facto bankroll the western world's exercise of military force around the world. It's not like the U.K. or France don't care about terrorism--if we weren't in Iraq or Afghanistan, they very well might be.
It's also misleading to look at inflation-adjusted figures. Inflation does a poor job of measuring the changing costs of things that aren't mass-produced consumer goods. The cost of microprocessor fabs, for example, has grown far in excess of inflation over the past few decades.
Automation and Chinese manufacturing has driven down the cost of say furniture, but military expenditures don't scale like that. Even solider pay has far exceeded inflation: Bottom-rung pay for an enlisted solider was about $50/month back then, or $700/month in today's dollars. The bottom-rung pay today is about $1,700/month. Likewise, custom-made weapons systems are produced by ever bigger teams of scientists and engineers, whose own salaries have far exceeded inflation. To use a private-sector example: while the 757 was developed for about $5 billion in today's dollars, the 787 cost at least $15 billion.
Better to look at spending as a percentage of GDP. Today, we spend half as much in inflation-adjusted dollars, but also our economy is almost 9 times larger.
If US wasn't in Iraq/Afganistan, we wouldn't have the terrorist problem as it exists today at all - maybe it would exist in some other form, but the current threats are pretty much exclusively the result of American thirst for conflict and war around the world. It might be the world police, but it's a world police which actively looks for trouble and causes it too.
And lots of overseas interventions (including in the Middle East) which contributed to people seeing the US as the enemy that contributed to the US being targeted by them, so that doesn't really in any way rebut a link between current terrorist threats and current/recent overseas interventions.
It's explained really well in this comment, if you can be bothered to read it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/wcpls/this_i_my_friend...
When someone's policy is mass murder that would happily target me, it's hard for me to muster much interest in whatever point they might be trying to make.
So I'm perfectly happy to say US policies in many countries have been greatly harmful, and also give a big middle finger to people who want to kill me.
Check your history books, the first major attempt on the twin towers was eight years prior, back in '93. Two US embassies were blown up in '98. Obviously, the terrorist problem existed long before those two wars and targeted many western countries, the US is no exception here other than the scale of the world's most famous attack.
Would that not be explained by the fact that 50 years ago we had a mostly conscripted military, and today it is entirely volunteer-based? Gotta pay more when people aren't being forced into it. I'm not even sure if I'm disagreeing with anything you've said, but I just wanted to put that fact out there as well.
So, of the money we get to direct each year to support American interests, half goes to the military.
Well no, because the portion of the budget that's non-discretionary spending also goes towards supporting American interests, and so does state and local spending.
Also, the relatively high percentage of the budget spent on defense simply reflects the fact that government in the U.S. is more limited in scope. E.g. the U.S. spends about 9.3% of state and federal expenditures on the military, versus about 5.9% in the U.K. But the U.K. has nationalized healthcare, and we do not. If the U.K. privatized their health system, their military expenditures as a percentage of their budget would go up; likewise our percentage would go down if we raised taxes to U.K. levels to fund a nationalized health system. But the appropriate size of each country's military doesn't change depending on whether healthcare is privatized or not. It's an entirely orthogonal issue.
The part that seems to be frequently missed in the analysis of military spending is that most of the top-ranking countries have a significant domestic arms industry which receives the bulk of that money. To my knowledge, Saudi Arabia is the only exception in that chart and their spending buys them a lot of political influence instead (e.g., [4])
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Anglo-Afghan_War
Huh? IIRC, the U.S. is surrounded by Canada, Mexico and a lot of ocean. I don't know how that can seem a realistic statement to you.
During WW2, US defense spending was over 40% of GDP. Today it's less than 5%.
In reality, it's used to backup the USD as reserve currency (Saddam switched to EUR as oil currency right before the US invaded Iraq) and to ensure we have our business interests supported around the globe.
Ostensibly this means we, as Americans, have a preeminent place as world citizens, but the reality is that the spoils from the dominant position we enforce is unequally split, and that inequality is further fracturing US society.
You also get an unrivaled navy that protects all this global trade.
You get allies in Europe who were able to rebuild under the threat of communist invasion because they didn't have to spend all their efforts maintaining a massive military to futily defend themselves.
You get thousands of nuclear weapons to guarantee that you'll never have a foreign army occupying your neighborhood.
(Also, former military functions—even fairly core ones—have been outsourced to civilian contractors: in WWII, we didn't generally have non-military contractors providing security for US military bases in combat zones, which has been done in recent overseas operations. So, simply comparing uniformed strength, even aside from capital intensity, is misleading.)
I'm reminded of this commentary by A. Whitney Brown when he talks about his support for our troops during the Iraq War.
https://youtu.be/Mg76Df0oSbM?t=1m53s
The whole thing is worth a watch.