I wouldn’t characterize defense spending as waste. China is a significant threat, for example, and maintaining superiority over them is of national importance IMO.
Suppose the US and China get into a direct conflict. How does the US having a 10x advantage in the number of traditional arms vs only, say, 2x stop China from threatening to obliterate humanity with nukes the minute their leadership is facing an existential crisis?
Given that, you can't think of a single scenario where having multiple floating runways would possibly benefit wartime?
Imagine a world where anyone can get unfettered internet access. Instead of the great Firewall of China, citizens can just access a starlink satellite. How does that help with spreading democractic ideals? How does protesting and information dissemination look different? What if citizens in Iran, Middle East, Myanmar, etc. could all do the same thing?
I hope Starlink is thinking about these Big questions.
It doesn't seem like a very promising route for bypassing authoritarian government restrictions on the Internet.
That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
Similarly, military aircraft crash vastly more often than their civilian counterparts, but consider extreme safety simply isn't what militaires optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The series of four accidents including those two in a short period in the US 7th Fleet was considered a sign of very significant problems. It is not at all typical of large, capable navies.
The reason for the fairly significant consequences, the global stand down, etc., is because, as many experts wrote at the time, they said a lot about the US Navy’s capacity for warfare.
> Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.
Sure, because war results in change in priorites in which the same skill and capacity will produce a much higher accident rate than peacetime.
But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.
Or simply a vastly different set of priorities. Navy ships are generally supposed to operate as a unit as their threatened by a host of over the horizon missiles, supersonic aircraft etc. In a very real way crashing into unknown ships isn't something that’s considered as a meaningful risk.
The root cause of these safety issues is however deeper. Militaries are constantly cycling both technology and people through positions. The specific implementation of training and UI where at fault for these crashes which is directly addressable. However, the institutional approach of using new people and technology has huge upsides in war. You need to be able to quickly replace losses in warfare so you need to rely on training not experience, and you need to test that this training is effective. Similarly, you can’t rely on proven technology and it’s proven training because new threats are constantly arriving.
That's directly going to cause accidents and while minimizing them is important, the long term tradeoff is considered worth it.
The USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain are US Navy ships that have both had serious collisions recently that lead to loss of life. Ships having accidents is not a particularly good measure of battle readiness.
I doubt very much that the children born on Mars will share your view about the value of Earth nations.
I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.
This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.
For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....