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Comment by mmiller9 | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely doubt our enormously bloated defense budget is because of research...

Guns and bombs are cheap. Everyone has plenty of them. The power of our military is in force prjoection; that is, the ability to use those guns and bombs anywhere at any time.

That requires massive, sustained logistics spending. To the point it may seem absurd and wasteful. But the alternative is fighting a fair fight on equal footing. I’d rather not do that.

Guns and bombs are cheap. The Zumwalt, F-35, B-2, and more are not cheap. I would point out that “smart” bombs and cruise missiles are not cheap, and the cost really starts to add up. Nuclear weapons research, production, and maintenance isn’t cheap.

So really it’s fair to say that guns and bombs aren’t cheap, but they are also a distraction from the delivery systems, which are catastrophically expensive.

the point it may seem absurd and wasteful. But the alternative is fighting a fair fight on equal footing. I’d rather not do that.

Yeah? Are you sure the alternative isn’t to spend 3 or 4 or 5 times as much as any other nation instead of 7 times as much? Maybe the alternative is to avoid boondoggles, and focus on proven tech. Of course the real alternative is that doing so would get in the way of the real business of arms dealing.

>The Zumwalt, F-35, B-2, and more are not cheap.

You're right, they sure aren't. But as a result no other military force on earth besides NATO has the capability to launch air superiority fighters from amphibious assault ships, and perform multi-ton circumglobal bombing sorties. That kind of capability doesn't come cheap, and shouldn't be dismissed.

Take away the B2 and we are fighting to-to-toe with Russian/Chinese long range bombers

Without the F-35 we are on equal footing with Chinese/Russian carrier based aircraft

Without Zumwalt class ships, we are going head on against Chinese missile destroyers and subs of equal capability.

The whole point is that you don't want an even remotely fair fight. "Keeping up" with others's spending, even within an order of magnitude, is a really bad idea if you can help it.

I don't disagree with your post, but you shouldn't use the Zumwalt class as an example because the US has decided to stop production of it after 3 ships. For a citation see the bottom of the section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Backgr...

I don't think the Zumwalt was ever meant to be a mass production ship. I think it was built the prove the concept of lower signature vessels. Notably it's too small and lightly armed to accomplish most Navy objectives. The stealth technology makes it hard to modify for specific objectives.

Basically, what are you going to do with a Zumwalt that you couldn't do with a submarine? Is it better at any of those tasks than a conventional destroyer?

>>I don't think the Zumwalt was ever meant to be a mass production ship

You think wrong.

Maybe I should have clarified that the Navy never considered it to be a real ship, for the aforementioned lack of a role in the fleet. Bath Iron Works probably wanted to build hundreds of them but that was little more than a hopeful fantasy on their part.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/business/09defense.html states that 10 "were originally planned" though the intro to the wikipedia article says that "the class was intended to take the place of battleships in meeting a congressional mandate for naval fire support," so I'm not going to dispute your clarification because I know that Congress sometimes forces the Navy to buy things the Navy does not want.

If the US military is, in any serious way, going toe-to-toe with Russian/Chinese bombers, I hope you've got your fallout shelter stocked, because as likely as not, both sides in the conflict will cease to exist ~20 minutes after that point in time.

Ukraine is still alive after 4 years of war with Russia. Relax.

They’re at war with Russia because they gave up their nuclear weapons. No one is invading a nuclear power, which I think is the point the post you’re responding to was making.

How you know that Ukraine still doesn't have nuclear weapons?

Because I assume that the Russians, when they armed it (In Soviet times), and then disarmed it (In post-Soviet times), could count up to, and back down from twenty.

If they still have weapons, they sure as hell haven't been using their existence as a deterrent. The whole point of having nukes is letting potential aggressors know that you have them, and that, if attacked, you may be crazy enough to use them.

> The whole point of having nukes is letting potential aggressors know that you have them, and that, if attacked, you may be crazy enough to use them.

You must know that Ukraine was attacked 4 years ago. So the "whole point" is not applicable in this case.

The point is not “Russia vs. USA” in an all out conventional war. It’s about spheres of influence. If I can project my will upon the (non-nuclearized) world more effectively than anyone else, my power increases substantially.

It’s why Russia is considered only a regional power, despite having a larger nuclear arsenal than the US. Their ability to perform intercontinental conventional bombing and troop deployment is non-existent. To cede this power to any other nation would be catastrophic to world peace.

Its about spheres of influence. If I can effectively project my will upon the (non-nuclearized) world more effectively than anyone else, my power increases substantially. Its why Russia is considered only a regional power, despite having a larger nuclear arsenal than the US. Their ability to perform intercontinental conventional bombing and troop deployment is non-existent. To cede this power to any other nation would be catastrophic to world peace.

What world peace? The US has started two wars that destabilized a whole region, and it shows no sign of restoring anything like peace there. World peace from such a belligerent nation, one that drone strikes most days of the week, is a bad joke or a real example of Orwell in action. How many pointless losing wars does the US need to start, how many governments does it need to overthrow only to see them revert to something even worse before you get that you’re about world peace.

You are not “the good guys.” The US is just in it for money, and that money only for a fraction of its population. It’s just a good thing the US can’t actually win a war it starts, or they’d have taken over by now. What’s actually happened is the likes of North Korea looked at what happened to Libya and Iraq and realized that they needed nuclear weapons. What a great outcome for “world peace” right? I’m sure those nuts won’t sell the technology, and other countries won’t follow suit so as not be “projected” all over.

how exactly do modern day bombers go "toe to toe"? do you send one into the other to crash into it?

Surely all you want to do is shoot them down. Bombers are purely offensive weapons. No one needs them unless they plan to attack somewhere else

> avoid boondoggles

The DoD budget, as usually reported, generally doesn't include funding allocated for specific operations (e.g. the Afghan or Iraq conflicts).

> focus on proven tech

The average soldier has always wanted proven tech. But what they really need (and what the officers ask for) is training. More HUMVEEs and Arleigh Burke destroyers, fewer wheel 4.0s and Zumwalts.

We are at the top of a power curve with regard to total dollars spent, but we actually about 4th in terms of defense spending as a percent GDP, (I think we're around 5th). Soft power remains our major advantage. Not that bad when you consider our outsize role in world military affairs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/06/25/the-bi...

> , (I think we're around 5th). Soft power remains our major advantage. Not that bad when you consider our outsize role in world military affairs. > https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/06/25/the-bi....

Your link says US is 4th in list of selected countries, not in the world. On this page US not in the top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

That’s as a % of GDP, and says more about the GDP than the military spending. The US is number 1 in total military spending many times over any other country in absolute terms.

Sure, as number 1 in nominal GDP.

> We are at the top of a power curve with regard to total dollars spent, but we actually about 4th in terms of defense spending as a percent GDP

Any reason why percent GDP is the right metric? If we're normalizing I would've expected per capita instead.

Then the Vatican would be topping the charts.

You sure about this? Any citations? I saw somewhere that it'd be Saudi Arabia.

I think you have a point about the Nuclear weapons research, production, and maintenance, however the parent post was saying that the "bomb" was cheap, its getting it to the location its needed was expensive. Airplane and smart bombs are logistics.

On the other hand, every time we fire a cruise missile, we're shooting off the equivalent of an NIH R01-scale research grant.

Serious question: how much of that cost is because we don’t have to fire them more?

WW2 is the only real example to answer this kind of question. For all the global skirmishes and regular war games and other exercises, since WW2 there really hasn’t been sufficient conflict to prevent manufacturing an ahead of time stockpile of desired weaponry at the prices set by companies in the military industrial complex. Price did come down in WW2 but it can be hard to attribute it specifically to “we used everything we built and wanted more delivered yesterday” when so many other factors are involved. Wartime rationing, production regulations, patriotic decision making affecting prices people charged the government, and the simplicity of the things being manufactured compared to the complexity of modern munitions.

At the end of the day I’ve personally settled on “yes but probably not as much as you might think”.

Multiple sourcing probably played a big role. Lots of companies were making Sherman tanks, for instance. IBM was making rifles along with many other companies.

There is no second source for the F-35.

The U.S. Navy has apparently bought 8,000 Tomahawk missiles overall and we've shot 2193 of them - but I genuinely don't know when Raytheon's volume discounts kick in.

What number would you place on the threat that Iraq posed to the United States? Would it be more or less than $1.1t?

But doesn't that mean that it would be cheaper for an adversary to just wait until the excessive military spending makes the US implode, figuratively, in debt? This same concern worried former president Eisenhower back in his days[0].

A similar argument is usually touted regarding the economic strain that the 'Space Race' caused the U.S.S.R.[1].

[0] "The Cold War: An International History", p. 42-43 https://books.google.com/books?id=Yv2FAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA43&pg=P...

[1] "Comparison of US and Estimated Soviet Expenditures for Space Programs", p. 3-4, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000316255....

The Space Race bankrupted an already failing command economy in the USSR. However it was a massive economic boon for US capitalists, as evidenced by our aerospace and defense industries today. The great thing about defense spending is that it is almost entirely domestic. We're not running up some huge trade deficit with a foreign power. It creates millions of jobs from Florida to California.

On the other hand, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window.

How does that apply here?

I believe the question is “does the spending result in a net benefit to society?”

I’d add in a consideration of the opportunity cost.

That’s not the broken window fallacy though.

That only works if you can survive the overspend, because it's being used to actively destroy you at the moment.

Ah, ... I see they've cut back on the education and civility budgets to accommodate for more military spending.

Who does the US intend to fight, and over what?

This logistic spending is certainly not for national defense - it has two oceans, a navy, and two thousand nuclear warheads for that purpose.

> Guns and bombs are cheap.

No, they are not. Go look up how much the military spends on such things. It is a lot. (Per unit and in aggregate.)

Apparently a military logistics expert system saved the US enough money during the Gulf War period that the savings essentially paid for all the Pentagon spending on AI research to that point. (And probably more than was spent on AI.)

The large US defense budget is almost entirely due to human costs.

The US has one of the highest median incomes on earth. Now combine that with the large human force that the US military has. The bases, veterans, healthcare, various benefits, retirement, equipment for the humans, salaries, and on it goes.

For example missiles + munition costs are a mere 2% of the military budget. Shipbuilding and maritime systems is a mere 3%. Aircraft and related systems is 5.x%. R&D is about 9%.

The budget related to operating the bases, maintenance, salaries, benefits, vets, and all other related human costs = $500 billion.

There's a strong argument that if you adjust China's military spending to factor in the difference in income / per capita costs for human soldiers vs the US (basically PPP adjusted), that China outspends the US already (and that's with an economy 1/3 smaller):

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-25/china-out...

The DoD budget exceeds Google's market cap, and their research budget exceeds Google's annual revenue.

That’s nuts, they could buy one Google per year. In five years they could own all the big tech companies.

Why is thang nuts? Tech industry is peanuts.

But they dont spend it nearly as efficiently. Gov is slow and bloated. It's why government contracts are so coveted, lots of money, long term contracts, overages are just part of life.

Ok but if 200 planes need to be upgraded so that they don't get shot down by ____ new weapon. It's not possible to build an ASIC for this, so you're probably looking at doing something on an FPGA. You need a few FPGA hardware engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers. Even if the project only takes a year to design, build, and test. And then you spend an extra 6 months because xilinx's fpga tools basically don't work. You've got minimum $1 million dollars in salary, and that's not including the facility, materials, and testing costs. Even if the program costs $20 million, if it saves 40 planes, you can't tell a dead airmen's family that their loved ones life wasn't worth $500,000.

America does that all the time with it's poor people.

And it’s soldiers. The IED situation took a long time to be addressed with more suitable equipment. Not that the U.K. did any better.

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