If you believe it's to build a next generation fighter plane then yes it's a disaster.
If you believe it's a way to funnel trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to private defense companies then it's a rousing success.
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."
" There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."
World War II is joined by the US. Shortly after we start selling war bonds to raise tons of operating capital. We commandeer Detroit and have them build airplanes. No new cars are made for something like four years.
The draft starts, women start making the airplanes, and any raw material that goes into equipment or feeding the army gets rationed.
After the war “we need to be prepared” morphs from maintaining a strong industrial complex into a special case: the MIC. Maybe because we felt that World War III would be fought in weeks and not years.
I don’t think we know that to be the case anymore. Wouldn’t it be better for the peace time welfare of Americans to spend this volume of money on all of the constituent pieces needed to build a war machine but in plowshare form.
Domestic production of steel, aluminum, titanium, rocket motor parts. High explosives. High output robust turbofans. Transsonic passenger jets. Sensor arrays, predictive systems, generators, high torque motors (IC and electric), rifles, tents, ruggedized integrated circuits.
Only a few of those are strictly wartime products.
The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties.
The Pacific front was a different story.
I'll just address the inaccuracies in your second paragraph.
By the time the US was engaging the Germans on land (Operation Torch in Nov. 1942), the Germans were already stuck in Stalingrad and had been defeated in their attempt to capture Moscow. They would never pose a serious threat in the East again. By spring they would be retreating as the Soviets unleashed their rebuilt armies on the weary Wehrmacht.
Operation Torch didn't go "poorly," though the green US troops didn't perform as well as seasoned British or German troops would have. Nor did US troops perform poorly during Operation Husky. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the US was performing extremely well.
Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output. Nor did they have a damaging effect on German morale.
> Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output.
This is the prevailing Allied view since most of the German industry ran on coal. But Germans themselves disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II#O...
For example, the 737 uses high bypass turbofans optimized around fuel burn, the fighter has a low bypass afterburning turbofan optimized around weight. Huge divergence. (And by the way, on both the civilian and military sides, engine development programs are yuuuge and very long. There's a reason for that that isn't simply due to greed.) The 737 has a standard weather radar, the fighter is able to focus megawatts in a narrow arc across less than a square centimeter of its nosecone and employs all sorts of trickery to resist (and possibly inflict) jamming, while detecting small targets that are trying to evade by blending into ground clutter or disappearing into something called the Doppler notch. Another huge divergence. Meanwhile the entire aircraft has been designed with stealth in mind, and that's a skill set with no civilian counterpart -- when was the last time you heard of an electrical engineer calling the shots on airframe design? Even designing for high supersonic aerodynamic performance (maneuvering, not just cruising) is pretty much a military-only skill, and supersonic analysis is wildly different from its subsonic equivalent. It just goes on and on -- I haven't even brought up guided missiles, which result from substantial development programs of their own and benefit little from civilian technology.
Now, there might be some subset of military products for which there aren't as many valuable differentiators -- I'm thinking of things like logistics assets, vehicles and infrastructure designed to move war materiel where it's needed. And there's precedent for that, where for example civilian airliners are converted into tankers. But on the whole, you can't take what you've learned building a 737 and apply that to building a competitive jet fighter inside of any reasonable time scale.
So, could you go to war with a 737 and a bunch of bombs hanging off it? Against insurgents, probably, yeah. But it's going to cost a lot more than, say, an A-10, the ground troops won't get any guns passes from you, and a single Su-27 is still going to ruin your whole day.
Another attractive option might be to skip a generation of hardware. But an important thing to remember is that every time a wise head retires from military aerospace, valuable skills and knowledge are lost. Sure, things are documented, but you can't easily replace human know how. So what happens when you go 20 years without a major fighter program? Experienced hands get thin on the ground and you spend a good amount of time and money climbing out of that hole. The upshot is that even if you'd like to get off the military upgrade treadmill for a while, you're going to pay some significant fraction of that savings down the road, whether in increased cost, schedule and/or reduced product performance.
Having said all this, I believe there are better ways to do what we're doing, and I think the F-35 was a foundationally ill-conceived program. But hand-picking a few basic military technologies to nurse while leaving the rest to whatever the civilian market will support is not the way to fix it.
As a result they have massively cut costs and are routinely doing what old space tells us was impossible.
The F-35 fills the same role as the Senate Launch System. It has accidental gains in terms of new technology and advanced airframes.
The military expertise of the USA could be maintained just as well if the USA would take simple measures like lifting the bans on supersonic planes put in place to kill Concorde ;)
The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure.
The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.
If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and practical realities dictate decisions.
If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh impossible to complete rises accordingly.
Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork, IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have known better when this boondoggle started.
I guess the war machine needs to function so that we only focus on the left hand, and ignores what the right hand does.
$700,000,000,000
But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe.
The MIC is very real. But it has been so normalized that few understand how "resource intensive" it really is. So much so (and I paraphrase):
"We spend more on defense than the next 8 nations COMBINED."
POTUS Obama SotU Address 2016
A former general and POTUS warned us about the MIC and we aren't interested.
I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')...
In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this.
I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...
You're not a cynic. You're spot on from my pov. It's the majority of semi-intelligent / semi-reasonable ppl who have lost their critical thinking minds.
What's going on is obvious, __if__ you're not constantly whipped up in some emotional frenzy. But that's a big if at this point.