There is a great Linus Tech Tips and Smarter Every Day Youtube video about this. Highly recommended!
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but if you're (successfully) occupying a nation, it is by definition not sovereign anymore.
Of course you can argue we shouldn't be involved in the Middle East, and there are some reasons to think we shouldn't be, but we can agree on that point and still believe the US should have the world's dominant military.
> but we can agree [that] the US should have the world's dominant military.
Who is "we"? It's not me.
I'm not that familiar with him, but he mentions a couple of types he's helped test for ATEC in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Strike_Missile
Judging by the video's contents, he's worked on more than just missiles.
I'm not trying to absolve Uber or something, for the record: the people who work for Uber aren't innocent, either. It just seems clear that they're a lesser evil. Malpractice versus malfeasance.
On the other side, consider for instance what Iran and Saudi Arabia would start doing to each other if the recently energy-independent US disengaged completely from the middle east. You can look at Syria in the wake of Trump's withdrawal for a tiny sample of the kind of violence that would occur in such a power vacuum.
Now none of that erases the various abuses and misadventures of the US military, but you're reducing a highly complex equation stretching over 70 years to a single simple variable: "Do the machines kill people or not?"
If every engineer in the US simply refused to build missiles as it appears you desire, the second, third and fourth order effects of that choice might kill even more people than if the missiles had just been built and potentially used. I'd argue it isn't clear at all whether Uber or the US defense industry is the lesser evil, and in fact there's a lot more history to take pride in in the defense industry.
The Saturn V's F-1 engines were originally designed for the Air Force. Would you boycott a video about the Saturn V made by someone who actually worked on the thing, because they worked on a part of the Saturn V when it was still a military project? I feel like that is a ridiculous purity test.
The Titan series of ICBMs, with light modifications, was a workhorse for America's civilian space program. The Atlas, Delta, and Minotaur families of rockets were also originally ICBMS. AFAIK the only deaths from the Titan II were industrial accidents, which can happen just as easily for a civilian rocket program (although silo conditions did exacerbate the accidents). I don't think it's fair to say that someone who worked on testing the rocket contributed to those deaths— if anything, competent testing should reduce the number of accidents.
I won't go too much into the less wholesome background of the Saturn V, which had multiple former Nazis in leadership positions, all of whom had previously worked on rockets like the V-2. The head of the Saturn V program office even gave up his US citizenship in the 80s as part of a deal with the government to avoid prosecution for war crimes and abuse of prisoners during the Holocaust. I don't understand why someone would be willing to accept that, but not accept involvement from a random test engineer at Redstone Arsenal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snTaSJk0n_Y
And planes still occasionally drop ICBMs that destroy people's houses.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/frozen-exc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aviation)
Steve Wozniak likes to put stickers in airport bathrooms that say "DANGER: DO NOT FLUSH OVER CITIES".
https://mmee.uah.edu/people/destin-sandlin
Destin is studying Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Alabama and an M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. While an undergraduate, he was awarded the University of Alabama's Outstanding Senior Award. He is a full-time Missile Flight Test Engineer at Redstone Arsenal.
He was doing a lot of episodes involving rifles, such as viewing the bullet's turbulence with polarization (iirc) and slo-mo. It was still scientific, but just a lot about guns. Then in the intro to one episode (sorry, I can't be bothered to go reference all of these), he said something like: people have criticized me because I talk a lot guns, but they're just so cool. In other words, "sorry not sorry." I closed the tab and never went back to his channel.
I'm in the US and I know guns are mainstream in the US, and he was actually good at studying them (not even really glorifying them). But there had been a lot of high profile shootings (Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Florida, etc.), so it just seemed off. And frankly, I'm not into guns myself (just like I'm not into the foodie trend), so since he stated clearly he was going to focus on firearms, I just stopped following.
It's a youtube channel, and we all have limited time, so I see nothing wrong with stating a reason for giving up on it--even if it's a politically or culturally charged issue. It's not like the parent comment or I are criticizing the channel or even arguing he shouldn't do what he does.