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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue opportunity cost from lack of innovation in medecine and e.g. car safety/car replacements kills more than US military involvements... Car deaths alone are >37K in 2016 in the US alone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

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At least 50,000,000 were killed in WW2 alone. In WW1 around 16,000,000 were killed. That is over 65,000,000 people killed counting only the two biggest conflicts of the 20th century. If another global conflict broke out, the death count could easily be 100,000,000. If the money the US spends on military keeps a world war from happening in the 21st century it will be money well spent.

It's really phenomenal to think about how many people died in WW2. It's literally difficult to even imagine. And your numbers there are a bit off. Estimates tend to start more around 70 million. And I think that's leading to you low ball the potential death toll in future wars. In 1945 the entire world's population was around 2.4 billion. Nearly 3% of the world was killed or died as a result of WW2. The world's population today is 7.6 billion. A war of the same effect would have an expected death toll of around 222 million people. And that's probably substantially lowballing it as we have far greater ways of killing each other now a days, even if we take nukes out of the picture.

Even just back to those 70 million, let's say 73 million as that's where Wiki starts and it seems reasonable. Just imagine that. That's a 9/11 scale of death every single day for 24,366 days. Or a 9/11 scale event every single day for 67 years. That's again difficult to even imagine. And all of that death, with a population 1/3rd of ours today, was compressed into 6 years. Such lessons should never be forgotten, but in a way it's difficult to learn from such things when we really cannot even imagine death and destruction on this scale now a days.

I believe the argument is that the research is supposed to lead to a lower chance of the US or allied citizen deaths by preventing advisaries from attacking. We hope that the expensive nuclear capabilities, for example, are never used. How do we measure the potential loss if we had no such capability?

Exactly. Military deaths are far exceeded by civilian ones, if only due to scale.

military deaths are historically low because of how much better the american military is than our opponents.

the american military is better because of the technology we have.

The technology we have is because of DARPA spending over the last 80 years.

do you see the flaw in your logic?

There are lots of reasons to spend money on military technology, but absolute reduction in deaths by U.S. citizens is not a compelling one — there are just too many civilians who die in preventable ways as compared to military deaths.

I think it’s kind of a silly comparison, tbh. I’d like to see us spend more money on both civilian and military research. I suspect that the military spends plenty of money on shit that is less impactful in the long term than research, and military research also often advances civilian technology.

My point was meant to be quite narrow.

Would you rather we have wars were America doesn't have a significant advantage?

Maybe like the civil war, where both sides were equal and 750,000 Americans died?

Or WW2, fighting against an arguably better Nazi and Japanese military killed 400,000 Americans?

Or WW1, where the stalemate between both sides led to 120,000 american deaths?

You must be right because all those american deaths are preferable to only 2,000 americans who died in the wars in Afghanistan.

/s obviously

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