Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means.

I agree that the US military has made positive contributions to the world, but I don't think it's the main source of the Pax Americana -- strong international bodies (NATO, UN, &c), the tendency for democratic nations (the dominant sort in the 20th century) to avoid wars with each other, and advancements in crop science are all individually more responsible for the relative global stability of the last 30 years.

I don't deny that the military had a role (usually financial) in any or all of the above, but I wouldn't call it a causal role: virtually all academic research funding hits the defense world eventually ("food security", "ecological security", &c), especially during the Cold War. That's the result of political contrivances, not any sort of deep connection between the U.S. military and scientific progress.

Finally, I wonder about drawing comparisons between the past U.S. military and current ventures. The Google engineers in question probably wouldn't be designing waterproof radios for fastboats; they'd be training models that "recognize" "terrorists" from afar and systems that pass that information to drones for remote killing. Put another way: the shift away from conventional warfare changes the moral dimensions of working for the military.

>That's the result of political contrivances, not any sort of deep connection between the U.S. military and scientific progress.

The DoD sure wants to have a major influence on fundamental research and scientific progress. http://www.defenseinnovationmarketplace.mil/FFRDC_UARC.html

The UARCs are DoD's attempts to have influence into fundamental research and engineering.

Those positive impacts probably are still likely due to political factors like you said, but it isn't for lack of the DoD trying.

Name 1 Major thing NATO or the UN has done without US support. The idea that they have any power outside what the US sanctions is to be pretty ignorant of the reality of power in world affairs.

You're missing the point. It's not that NATO and the UN are powerful or effective as bodies independent of the US, it's that their greatest achievements have occurred without direct US military intervention.

NATO and the UN both benefit (and suffer) from the power and presence of the US military, but their proudest moments (the German economic miracle, smallpox eradication, historic decreases in child mortality and malnutrition) all stem from smart policy and liberal principles, not from the looming threat of American tanks.

I think you're the one missing the point. While the U.S. military's record in the past 100 years or so is not unblemished, it has unquestionably been one of the greatest forces for good on the planet. Absent the defensive shield provided by the U.S. military:

- At some time between 1945 and 1950 the USSR likely would have moved the Iron Curtain all the way to the Atlantic, and quite possibly to the west coast of Britain or even Ireland. Practically anyone who lived under Communist rule in Central- and Eastern Europe would agree that this would have been a Very Bad Thing.

- In the summer of 1950 the Korean peninsula would most certainly have been reunited under the Kim Il Sung regime — this damned near happened anyway, when the U.S. and ROK forces were nearly pushed into the sea at Pusan — and the South Korean economic miracle would never have occurred, to say nothing of the fact that the North Korean gulag would be that much larger.

- Japan probably would have rearmed, and who knows what that would have led to.

Oh, and absent the freedom of the seas heretofore provided by the United States Navy, the world's economy would look very, very different.

As to "smart policy and liberal principles," those are certainly important. But as President Obama said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, nonviolence wouldn't have stopped Hitler's armies.

Disclosure: I'm biased — I'm both a veteran and the son of a career U.S. military officer.

So the massive amount of US dollars funding those operations are irrelevant?

At the end of it all, the threat of violence moves humans. We don't need to qualify it with good or bad. It is in our nature.

The fact that people are spurred into action by violence doesn't mean that we ought to be violent, or that violence is even the most effective way to get people to act in the way you want.

> This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means.

You’re begging the question. If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means? When the Roman Empire fell, we call the subsequent period the dark ages. What does that say about whether the Roman Army was good or bad?

> If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means?

I think so. Here's an example: over 3/4ths of released prisoners are re-arrested within five years. Half are re-arrested within a year of release[1]. If my end is substantially reducing the crime rate, I could reasonably claim that mandatory lifelong sentences would achieve that end: recidivism would be eliminated, and there would be a strong disincentive for anybody to commit even minor crimes. But this is clearly a terrible means, both legally and morally: the punishment doesn't fit the crime, and we end up condemning 25% of the prison population to a life in jail because of a statistic.

[1]: https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...

At the risk of sort of invoking Godwin, I'm curious if you'd apply the same logic to Stalin and the fall of Nazi Germany. What does the victory in the Battle of Berlin say about whether Stalin was good or bad?

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