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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

One important piece of military preparedness is having a population of experienced engineers, manufacturing infrastructure, leadership, R&D, etc. Institutional knowledge is very real. Weapons programs also simply take decades. You might be able to churn out web apps in a few months, but cutting edge aircraft, not so much.

What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy.

You have to remember our military budget covers all of NATO in an intentional bid to reduce the military power of our allies which helps keep them peaceful.

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> What do we have? Unprecedented world peace. Why do we have it? American foreign policy.

Wait, what?

There have been hundreds of armed conflicts going on around the world since the end of WW2, many of which were either directly instigated by the USA or at least involved the USA. There are dozens going on right now [1] some resulting in massive casualties. I don't think we will ever see world peace.

You don't mass-produce already-obsolete fighter jets in order to promote peace or as an innocent act of military preparedness and industry knowledge-building. You build them to fight war.

1;: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...

It isn’t about absolute peace, that is practically impossible.

It’s about relative peace, worldwide number of conflicts, casualty rate by population, geographical spread of conflicts, etc.

What is unprecedented is your chance of being killed in war has gone down substantially and stayed down after WWII. The types of conflicts have changed, civil wars now dominate, other types have gone down significantly or have been eliminated. There have not been conflicts between major military powers.

I worry about what happens when Pax Americana inevitably ends, as all things do, and if it will come in our lifetimes. I don't think that we have built a geopolitical system that will survive its absence.

Spending our money on a giant military behemoth makes sense in a mutually assured destruction / deterrence sense, but I think that approach only gets you so far. It also creates a gigantic war machine that exists only to find conflicts. The nuclear arsenal strongly deters conflicts from rising above a certain level (as long as rational people are on both sides...), but the rest of the machine gets put to use distressingly often.

You can't just stop funding it tomorrow, and you can't even really reduce its funding without considerable pain and risk, but we must find a way to transition more and more of our military power to economic and cultural diplomacy (which we also have always done, but which has been diminished in recent years).

I would sooner credit the 35th rule of acquisition ("Peace is good for business") than American foreign policy for the lack of a global conflict.

Bad example. It's not to be confused with the 34th rule of acquisition (war is good for business).

But then what changed between 1900 and 1945? We had two world wars between those years and nothing but small localized wars never between major powers after?

Weapons. We developed weapons that could sanitize the planet, and in the case that someone might challenge our intention to actually use them, we developed weapons that ran the spectrum so that war against us would always seem a major losing proposition. The only thing left is insurgency and proxy wars, always carefully enough to not trigger major action.

Given that game becoming economically codependent and the world is the best play for the available game, and then indeed “peace is good for business”.

Small localised wars??

Did you know that the Vietnam War had the biggest aerial bombardment in history[1], of all wars?

The body count in Vietnam easily exceeded 1 million and may be as high as 4 million[2].

Do you think that's a small, localised conflict?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombing_campaigns_of_t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Yes, I do. Another war between great powers in 1970 could have had a death toll in hundreds of millions.

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