It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
--President Dwight Eisenhower
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
Here's an attempt to update that comparison:
The lowest estimate I could find for one F35 is about $110 million. One bushel of wheat has ranged from $5 to $6 recently. I'll use $6 here.
At these prices an F35 would buy more than 18 million bushels of wheat, or 36 times as much as Eisenhower's 500,000 estimate.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21776/f-3...
Why aren't they doing it? Could it be because we don't optimize for 'overall value created'?
Either the tax money would have been collected anyway, and spent somewhere. Or the tax money would not have been collected and it would have been "naturally" allocated by the population.
I wouldn't say the F-35 is useless. It contains a breathtaking integration of advanced technologies. There are benefits to that R&D. It's also an incredibly capable platform–the principle complaint is it's too capable, that we could have gotten more bang for our bucks with more less-capable planes.
You're right. After 28 years and $1 trillion it FINALLY delivered a single bomb in Afghanistan two weeks ago.
Not totally useless.
If something is overproduced, it accumulates and/or falls in price. There is no "crisis of overproduction," though there may be a "crisis of underinvestment in research" and "crisis of underemployment," both problems the American military budget addresses.
For Lockheed Martin. Are they obligated to publish their R&D findings for the Pentagon or anyone else?
Or another point of view: You think those people can either build overpriced planes or nothing at all (paying them to do community service or work on open source projects might even be preferable)?
The US (and all countries) actually do have quite a large sector of state-planned economy. Discussions about whether a country really needs to have a military more capable than the next ten (or whatever number it currently is) countries combined aside, the actual main purpose from the point of view of most politicians is to be able to have government handouts for their constituents, military results are secondary because given the huge amount of resources spent overall they'll win anyway. But instead of calling for everything to be a "free market" (whatever that means), maybe admitting that maybe a large state sector is useful might help find other places to spend such huge sums. Right now the by far most convenient way is the emotions-laden "defense". Part of the problem is that we give politicians no other choice to use money, military is the only sector where they can get away with it. Oh yes, social spending, but that does not lead to production or research or at least not nearly on a similar enough scale, besides, it is much more under attack than military spending.
I also wanted redundant protection from incoming enemy ICBMs.
Since WW2, the question "if this doesn't work, am I or someone I know going to get killed?" has been false for the people designing, organising, funding and procuring these systems.
But that same money could have been spent to actually do something useful and it still would have had that economic impact.
*And now I see where everyone else already made this extremely obvious point.