Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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One of the major problems with statistics like these is that they don't talk about the context of the relationships here.

Since the 90s, the Executive branch and US Congress has used the Military to do a lot of non-military stuff, that arguably the State Department or other non-military organizations should be doing.

There are a lot of reasons for this:

1. At 600,000+ FTE's, the DoD has the largest number of personnel in the Federal Government

2. Military members are trained not just for their specialty, but to do a wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical tasks that can be used in non-military capacities.

3. It's often easier to tack on money for non-military specific functions to augment military organizations, than it is to create new organizations.

As a result of this, the DoD is constantly asked to do things that are not directly related to combat in support of international relations, international logistics, basic services and basic research worldwide.

Absolutely, the military continues to take on a variety of non-military functions. That being said, it does not detract from the point that the first use case is for war, and as long as these many other org exist under the DoD structure, the first case will be for war, always.

As bluntly as you want to state that it doesnt become a better of an argument. What would be your alternative. The above poster seems to have given a pretty clear reason why we would want the military to take on these tasks (variety of skill in personel). Do you have a cheaper better way?

This sound like the most efficient thing that the government has done. Its probably also a good way to instill compassion in our ranks by having them perform civilian tasks. Instead of everyone just being something they shoot or dont shoot in these countries.

Rollout the "non-military stuff" and move the "wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical tasks" into a proper group like the State Department or some new group with no final militaristic consideration. Doing this would take political capital, which is why it's not popular practice.

The issue is that the military takes on so many roles that it becomes our first choice in dealing with problems, whether they require the military or not. So we go at problems with the military mindset, then we're surprised when we find a military solution.

Let's go in for peace, diplomacy and honest-to-god negotiation instead of imposing our will on countries with air superiority and more guns than people. Maybe we'd foster a little less resentment in countries we're in if we stopping occupying their airspace and bombing them 10,000 feet and 400mi away.

> move the "wide variety of administrative, management, financial and medical tasks" into a proper group like the State Department or some new group with no final militaristic consideration.

These skills aren't distinct from the skills a military needs to function. Logistics is a huge component of warfare, for example - and would you prefer that combat medics be civilians? Elsewhere in the thread people are commenting about dual-use technology - these are all dual-use skills.

The above poster seems to have given a pretty clear reason why we would want the military to take on these tasks

As clarification, in my opinion The military should not take on these jobs.

This is a very important point. When we say that we're in all of those countries...doing what? Medical clinics? Training policemen? We do a little bit of everything everywhere.

Instead of a Space Force, I'm in favor of a new branch of DoD dedicated to non-combatant operations. Nation-building, partner-support.

Making one big pile of money that does all the things DoD does makes it impossible to make decisions about what's being spent well or not.

They used to call it the War Department. At least with that name, the public discussion about it could be honest.

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