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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

We have the resources. What we lack are necessary priorities and the resolve to fix them.

The latest DoD budget is $700 billion. Russia's DoD budget is approx 10% of that. That's not a typo 10%. China might not be an ally - in the historical European sense - but given our symbiotic economic relationship it would like take quite a bit for a true military conflict to break out between the two countries.

Even if our DoD budget was 2x Russia's, the ~$550+ billion is still a lot of money. Money cant love, nor evidently priorities rooted in the 21st century.

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I've fantasized about this as a solution before. If you tell the military that in 10 years you're cutting their budget to $250 billion and somehow manage to instill in them that a) you're serious and b) you will not repeal your decision, I have no doubt they would successfully adapt (just like every industry who complains about regulations have ultimately adapted).

I am curious, however, in HOW they would adapt.

I wouldn't want them to drop their research budget (much). Research is almost always good.

For one, you could discharge some of our 1.5 Million active troops [1]. I don't really know why we have that many. That'd measurably cut down on the second largest chunk of the budget (wages) [2].

The highest is 'Operations and Maintenance' and the third highest is 'Procurement'. With a reduction of manpower, they need to procure less. They can retire many assets. I would prefer they NOT sell them to more local police, but thats a different discussion. Procurement could be done MANY times smarter. The F35 is a disaster of design by committee and if each military branch had designed their own plane, I'm sure they'd each have gotten a better one. And, of course, with less money, they have more incentive to push back on the industrial part of the complex for more reasonable prices.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Per... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_2010_Military_Budget_... (it's 2010, but the proportions should be similar)

2 wks ago on one of the NPR shows these was an interview with one of the members of Congress, Dem from VA I think. He has something to do with the Russia hacking investigation.

In the middle of the interview he mentions the DoD budget and more or less says - as an active member of Congress can - we're wasting too much money on 20th century warfare and not enough on 21st century (cyber) capabilities.

General + POTUS Eisenhower is in heaven laughing, "I warned you. I told you so. You morons."

I mean, that is also true, but if we take 50% of our '20th century' budget and spend it on '21st century' stuff, we still will spend too much.

Put another way, inefficient allocation is an orthogonal problem to giving too much to the allocator.

that's not wrong but for the sake of argument perhaps its better to look at the DoD budget through the political lens ... its a corrupt jobs program in which the government funnels money to a broad swath of American states and counties, mostly via defense contractors.

Yes its incredible dumb and inefficient but many millions of people earn their livelihood, healthcare and pensions by building useless bombs, so its hard (politically) to say we'll take that away to shore-up Social Security or whatever.

Instead you let a benefit the entire population depends on to keep the jobs of a fraction of the population. How is that a rational choice?

If the military industry became unemployed, social security would get a lot more expensive.

If only it's politically feasible to slowly redirect their activities to peacetime activities, like reassign a lot of that personnel to the Army Corps of Engineers, and have them fix America's crumbling infrastructure.

It does seem a little insane that we don't adopt the part of the Roman professional military system that was arguably one of the most effective.

It would be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if the cut the US military budget dramatically. I am of the opinion that it would decrease the world stability and millions of people would die. But YMMV.

When did it become our job to police the world? Especially when it creates blowback (e.g., UBL).

You might be right. But the USA's DoD budget is more than the NEXT 10 countries COMBINED. So we're VERY afraid? And we're alone with that having that fear?

Maybe we find what we're looking for?

The fundamental/fucked-up thing is that if you cut the military budget it's not that soldiers stop getting recruited it's that tank/jet/boot/GPS/mre companies start firing people. The Military Industrial complex is a huge welfare/workfare program that no one in power is willing to cut. So until we can convince essentially EVERY voter (any party: libertarian, green, D or R) that it's okay to have a real safety net then politicians who campaign against the military budget are basically lost causes.

A lot of military spending is building stuff to blow up. I rather pay people to build windfarms and trains.

Oh God So Would I.

I'm on my phone otherwise I could list umpteen better uses of the money. But they all involve firing people then hiring people. MRE quality assurance however is not co-located or skill- transferable to installing solar panels in the llano estacado. And people losing their jobs are always going to be more motivated voters than people who might get a job.

Some jobs deserve to end. - like insurance sales jobs and ceo's, medical billing, and excessive military jobs that we don't really need. What value does insurance really have? It's a glorified red-tape filled billing system. All it does it take money, split it up to pay employees, and then give like maybe 40% to the actual doctors and hospitals providing the services (made up #, no idea what they really get) -- but then the hospital employees hundreds of medical billers to work w/ the insurance agencies and negotiate rates and procedures and get paid as much as they can.

One reason GBI/universal healthcare would be beneficial is because then we can have a reason to end useless jobs that we don't really need to have, and eventually (hopefully) we have post-scarcity, low-employment, and high-enjoyment because AI/Robots do the work, and we all live in varying degrees of middle-to-upper class life. Maybe we spend 18 hours per week working (the same as during the middle ages), and the rest of our lives we actually live.

The rich can still be uber rich and live in mansions and fly on their jets, but lets fill the millions of vacant homes, and make sure everyone has a home, basic comforts, and food.

Life is precious, we don't get much time. We spend 10 full years out of 90 working -- that's if you add up all the hours and divide by days/years.

Then you sleep 8 hours per day. That's 1/3rd of the day. 30 years of life gone to sleep. Now we're at 40 years gone -- 40 years that we do not get to keep at all for ourselves.. This is a middle-ages life-time. They only got 40 years total, and we waste all of that.

There's tons of other stuff we waste time on with school, eating, restroom, commuting to work, etc... That might add up to 10 more years. This means you may get 40% of your life --to claim for yourselves, this is ONLY if you don't have to ever work more than one job, and ONLY if you never ever work overtime or more than 40 hours per week.

If you work on side projects or moonlight projects, it's more fun and rewarding but you're also losing time spent with family and loved ones, or enjoying life.

This keeps me up at night, knowing I could die at any time, and never really have lived because of all the things I have to do just to make sure I make it through next month - financially.

I'm a freelance developer, but have months where I do really well, and others where I'm on the verge of losing everything, because my pipeline dries up. I'm hoping I can even it out, and make it work, because when it works the stress is so much less than commuting to a corporation.

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