Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

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Folks, realize that US military spending:

- backstops the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, which allows the US to have a large deficit with low risk to its economic system, which basically means the US can ship paper to other countries and they will send real stuff back to us in return. Let's not kid ourselves, this has a lot to do with the US' large military and financial advantage.

- makes opportunistic authoritarian governments around the world think thrice before invading their neighbors. Consider what it would be like if the charts here were moving up and to the right instead of flat: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

- ensures the relative safety and efficiency of international shipping routes and underpins global commerce

- provides funding for basic research has lead to many innovations. DARPA, anyone?

- keeps weapons expertise and manufacturing capacity within US borders, which creates US jobs and reduces the capability of other governments to develop competitive arms independently, which keeps them within the sphere of US influence and protection. Other countries look at our military budget and think "we could never compete, let's just buy their weapons, and make nice with the US". Think of what the alternative would look like.

We can debate the morality of the specific wars that the US has gotten entangled in. We can debate the relative size of the military budget, to some degree. But it would be foolhardly to ignore the upsides to military spending altogether.

Thinking that this spending is ok based on your reasons amounts to a tacit acceptance of a huge amount of dishonesty, I find it quite cynical.

This is a totally ass-backwards way to do stimulus and domestic investing, with the upside that it lets you do stimulus and domestic investing while pretending you're not doing it, but doing something macho and patriotic instead.

This is a way to maintain US economic and diplomatic dominance while pretending it's all about Defense/The Homeland/Freedom(tm), all while telling all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded by (who this time?) and killing bewildered probably innocent (whooo?) that this is all about loving and defending your country.

If you can't openly sell empire to your citizens, maybe you shouldn't have an empire.

I didn't see the part where I said anything about stimulus or investing.

WWII is what enabled the US to adopt this position, and its memory, rapidly fading into history, are why the US chose involvement and leadership of the world instead of isolation. Before WWII the US was (relatively) isolationist. You can claim that it would have been better off staying that way, but given the way things spiraled into WWII, the conclusion of US leaders was a reasonable one: we must lead, or else things will spiral into conflict once again, and we will not be able to contain, control, or ignore it.

How could they come to any other conclusion? They had already tried the "let's try to avoid picking sides and please can't we all just get along" option in WWI and it turned out, shall we say, badly.

None of this excuses the absolute folly of the US' many military misadventures, and likely huge amounts of waste (in terms of people and treasure) in pursuing them. I am merely pointing out that the idea that we could abolish most military spend because somehow the world will just get along by itself, or even that we can just ignore what happens elsewhere, is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time.

If you want a really cynical view: consider that military spending (at every level from large weapons systems down to local spending around military bases), veterans services, and general disability benefits are in some sense the only social spending accepted by a significant fraction of the population.

When I am feeling very cynical, I think of how government spending and pork-barrel politics reflect the same quirk of psychology seen in the marketing of burly SUVs and trucks to the segment that could otherwise be served by minivans and economy cars.

There are multiple points in the parent's post. While I agree that the idea of unnecessary military spending is noxious, the impact of safe global shipping and the unmeasurable deterrent effects for global stability may still be important. It's not clear to me how we measure and assess the value of this vs. hypothetical and more desirable alternatives.

If we weren't maintaining safe global shipping and other elements of global stability on the sly and with a self-serving twist, maybe the vacuum would have caused the global community to come together to achieve the same ends, in a more transparent and less lopsided and brutal (one can only hope) way.

While I agree that sounds nice, my intuition suggests that the incentives and scale would tend to lead towards conflict. It might be interesting to model the stability of systems like this, though it's a hard problem to model chaotic nonlinear dynamical systems. It's not even clear what the state variables should be, but I'm curious if anyone has tried this.

Maybe and Hope are the usually the best plans.

The planning equivalent of Thoughts and Prayers.

To speak to the parent's points -- WW1 happened and the League of Nations failed to prevent an even worse conflagration.

Say what you will about US v USSR, or the post-Cold War US hegemony, there has been no WWIII.

>all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded

Combat deaths in the US military are lower on average than roofers, steel workers, fisherman, loggers, and quite a few other professions.

So I don't think that argument holds water. There are actually some theories that the specific group of young males that join the military are safer than if they didn't due to traffic accidents and other stupid things that young males do when they've got too much free time and too little discipline.

> US military spending...provides funding for basic research

Someone has to really have drank the kool-aid to even comprehend that statement, never mind believe it. What does military spending have to do with basic research?

If what you mean is that the US has a convoluted, wasteful system where workers work, get taxed, the money is sent to the Pentagon, and physicists at universities have to write out fantasy-laden grant proposals to DARPA about how their non-military basic research work has military purposes, then yes, "US military spending provides funding for basic research". This really got going in the 1970s, I recall one story of a physicist grant proposal for a basic research study into the theory of relativity being presented as research that would benefit small trajectory changes in rocket launches.

You seem to have a high estimation of the idea of the rest of the world on the leash of imperial America (with the phrase imperial America being apropos for your picture). I suppose American academics doing basic research should also be subjected to domination by the Pentagon, in your view.

Japan has a much less wasteful funding of research with MITI. You don't have scientists wasting time writing bogus grant proposals for basic research being reviewed by people sitting at desks in the Department of Defense.

Japan has a large portion of their military spending covered by the United States. It's not a fair comparison. You would need to compare another global superpower such as USSR, Great Britain before the empire waned, Spain, etc. Most of the world's advances have been funded by military resources or wealthy private individuals. I wish it wasn't true because I personally think we'd be better served on cancer research than almost any research into better bombs, soldier exoskeletons, jet packs, etc.

Actually, I agree with you that this is kind of how it works. My point is simply this: the headline number for "military spend" includes a great deal of funding for research:

https://www.aaas.org/programs/r-d-budget-and-policy/historic...

No, I don't believe this is a great system. On the other hand, consider that if research spending weren't under this guise, would popular support for research allow for the funding to exist at current levels, much less increased ones? Given understanding of the average American of basic science, that would be a stretch (to put it mildly).

Perhaps having researchers write a few extra paragraphs in grant proposals isn't so bad after all.

So you're saying we, the rest of the world, are funding your inefficient military budgets and troops sitting in garrisons around the world, doing push-ups, playing with guns and yelling each other? Had US policymakers little more sense in their heads I'm sure they could achieve the same result (dictators around the world not willing to invade their neighbours) and get actually working infrastructure. But nope, let's waste the money on teaching people how to kill and neglect the actually productive projects for the sake of global "peace". And how's that been working so far?

Sure it's hard to assess how much military spending is the "right" amount and how much US prevents unrest on global scale. But let's not kid ourselves, we'd all be better off if we didn't have to spend money on keeping armies. They produce next to nothing on economic growth or scientific progress. We'd be having colonies on Mars if US had spent a part of that money on NASA.

Yes, exactly. You, the rest of the world, are indeed subsidizing this system to some extent, and in exchange, far fewer of your own young people are sitting in garrisons around the world, doing push-ups, playing with guns and yelling each other.

I won't defend US incompetence wrt infrastructure. But I will observe that "spending more" hardly seems to be the problem, as we seem to do plenty of that already. It's that (lack of) stuff we get in return that's the problem.

As far as global "peace", it is certainly true there is still conflict, but from the bigger picture perspective it's been a relatively peaceful half century.

Again I'll point to this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace. Consider that the y-axis is log scale, and contemplate the WWI and WWII bubbles at the top.

Hmm that's a good point. There's a power balance that would otherwise be filled with for example European countries spending more on their militaries. So in that sense we are paying you for keeping the playing field safe for others. Interesting thought. Still doesn't change the fact that military spending is more or less money wasted. So is it better for you waste that money than us, I don't know. Probably.

But say what if US had reduced military spending after the collapse of Soviet Union by let's say half, would the world be much worse than it's today? From statistical perspective while it seems that there's causation between US military superiority and the lack of conflicts compared to prior decades, it might be as well that the world has just become less warlike. Sure it would suck if WW3 happened though. Anyway, it's not a reason not to fix your infrastructure :).

Sure we can all acknowledge those are all deeply complex and intertwined facts about the U.S. and its military strategy and spending. Foreign policy, both diplomatic and militaristic, are also not democratic - I think some people just want to call out "the worlds exemplar of democracy" spending the largest portion of its budget on undemocratic means. We The People want to see something more meaningful domestically from our tax dollars and public debts - if the elite know better, then drop the facades.

>We The People want to see something more meaningful domestically from our tax dollars and public debts - if the elite know better, then drop the facades.

I think this is what people don't get about US military spending. From the moment you wake up every single day you are directly benefiting from it as an American. The fact that you, as a normal middle class person, are able to step out of your brand new house purchased with a no money down 30 year mortgage, step into a brand new car you don't own that's financed at 2%, drive to a brand new shiny shopping mall, and buy brand new fancy $200 t-shirts at the shopping mall on your no-limit 0% credit card is because of the fiat-reserve currency system setup by the US fed, and defended by the military.

Meanwhile a larger and larger portion of our population declines into third world living conditions.

According to the US Census Bureau, poverty in the US has been on the decline since 2010. It's still not below the 2000 levels, but is still declining.

It is possible for the total poverty rate to get lower, while the rate and absolute numbers of people in extreme poverty (hence the term third-world) increase.

https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_m...

Analysis in this paper also based on Census data.

Also, I don't know that I would exactly declare victory on poverty rate based on just recent data. It looks like we've just fought it to a rough standstill from the 70's on, which is disappointing from an advancement of civilization point of view. The 2010 decrease was just getting it back to 1970's level poverty after an increase bubbled up post-2008.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

Note the rise in the below 50% poverty level figure in the chart.

>It is possible for the total poverty rate to get lower, while the rate and absolute numbers of people in extreme poverty (hence the term third-world) increase.

In fact I'd argue this is exactly what's happening. The people who are willing and able to move out of impoverished regions to the coastal megacities are doing much, much better now than they were 10 years ago. But the ones who have stayed are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty as the economy completely shifts focus.

I said that We The People want to see something more meaningful. This would include political policy covering relatively standard democratic ideals: (to keep it extremely simple) health and education. I am aware our public dollars go towards defending the private-enriching capitalistic system you just described. It is ironic you listed all of those things as "benefits" to me - they are exactly what I am saying I do not want. Public expenditures for private gains? I did not vote for that. I want public dollars going to defending something for the majority, not the few.

> spending the largest portion of its budget on undemocratic means

That is just simply not true. The largest part of the US budget is ~1.25 trillion USD spent on Social Security and Unemployment, after that it's ~1 trillion on Medicare & Medicade, and ~600 billion on Defense.

Make no mistake the US spends wayyyy too much on the military, but it's not #1

> I think some people just want to call out "the worlds exemplar of democracy" spending the largest portion of its budget on undemocratic means.

what do you mean by "largest portion" here?

>makes opportunistic authoritarian governments around the world think thrice before invading their neighbors

This can only have been an ironic or tongue-in-cheek comment.

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

And most importantly relative to the article we can debate bang for our buck or what else could be done with some of that money.

One can bring up evil dictators or reserve currency or whatever, but there is lots of waste, irresponsible spending, pork barrel, district welfare and all sorts of other issues. To say nothing of the contractor complex.

The objectives you speak of aren't being efficiently nor sustainably achieved. They are arguably and very tenuously occasionally being brute forced out in an extremely wasteful fashion.

And this isn't a statement on the righteousness of American power projection which is another argument all together.

Basically, this goes well with "America First" attitude. I don't have a problem with it but things doesn't work out when all big countries keep themselves first.

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