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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Is all defense-related work complicit in murder?

Do we not need a military?

Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?

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There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.

There's not, because it maintains a world order that would be happily taken up by someone else if the US didn't do it.

There absolutely is a middle ground. It starts with actual audits of the DoD, which requires no reduction of capabilities and have never even been completed once.

The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.

We outsource the dirty stuff. The important thing is that there is a market for our bullets and bombs.

Annexed? In 2020, there is no need to annex a country to get everything you want from them - on the contrary, it's an administrative nightmare to annex a country when you can stick your military bases there, export your goods there, and make their economy dependent on your country's and your money without it.

We have over 800 military bases in ~70 countries around the world.

How about shaping countries like Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, South Korea, Japan, etc etc etc, all in ways (intended to be) economically beneficial to the US?

If you can stage a coup or rile up and train a militia to fight your proxy war, there is no need for an outdated notion of "imperialism".

The US has the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and that power is not simply being tossed into the dumpster.

The kinds of things that the military would be doing on a cloud platform seem likely to occupy that middle ground.

The US is not imperialistic, that's just a cute talking point.

That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point.

However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different from saying the budget just needs to be reduced.

The US has nukes. Nobody's ever going to attack it directly. Why do you need overwhelming military dominance in conventional forces then? I suspect it has something to do with being able to force point of view by having big stick available to back it up.

There's also a lot of middle ground between a "point of view", by which I assume you mean interests which are not justifiable defense, and behavior so beyond the pale you'd want to melt an entire city to prevent it. Particularly since the pollution and lingering health effects of nukes are so unacceptable compared to conventional alternatives.

Somehow I do not notice middle ground. All I see is the overwhelming force present virtually everywhere you can point your finger on the map bar couple of places where the US dares not to go. Meanwhile I think even with 1/10th of it current force the US can surely defend its territory and citizens. I agree about pollution: depleted uranium and agent orange for example are way more preferable then the alternative.

> The US is not imperialistic, that's just a cute talking point.

Cuba's shiny new banking system, Japan's Navy(?), and Afghanistan's poppy fields disagree.

Sure, there can be a middle ground in spending. But that doesn't change the GP's point: whether it's a massive military or a modest one, the purpose of a military lies in its potential to injure & kill people. As such, so long as you agree that some level of military is needed, you've already crossed the "no killing" line.

Less empire, more democracy.

Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit.

The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afghanistan for funsies, there's no point to most of it.

We've only had one success in decades, and it still wasn't even related to defense!

There's a difference between defense and imperialistic invasions, and the United States military hasn't defended much of anything at home in quite a while.

If you think that the only thing the U.S. military does is "assault" then you haven't really done any research at all, have you? Read up on force-projection, specifically as it relates to soft-power.

Note I said most cases, which, in English, means "not all cases, but most of them."

Obviously, the U.S. Military does slightly more than assault. Proportionally not much more, but a bit more. Like football.

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

Oh, okay. Unless you're relying solely on your "intuition" of what the U.S. military uses resources for, please post sources or figures for your quantification of U.S. force projection and how it's "mostly" used for assault.

Assault - direct attack

Force projection - do as we say or else.

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