6th Generation Stealth Fighter: Joint Effort by UK, Japan, Italy and Sweden?

Crazy idea. Jews drive/catch public transportation on Fridays, muslims drive/catch transportation on Saturdays, and the rest of us ride around everyday of the week, because in what world is any of this a good idea?

It would look a lot more like regional conflicts without $1 billion each fighter jets.

Iron Dome, drones and other technology prove this can be handled regionally without the need for a single advanced fighter jet, ballistic missile submarine, or any of these other frankly absurd expenditures.

The work force dedicated to these (admittedly very impressive) weapons of war would have to focus their skills elsewhere.

Peace is what the United States has had with Vietnam since 1975.

How can we understand that, when the reason for going to war, at the cost of 58,000 American lives, was that without an intervention, the domino theory predicted that the world order would inevitably collapse?

It didn't.

Vietnam, notwithstanding the pandemic, is a tourist destination where 18 year old American kids have the time of their live in complete safety.

Money for peace would investigate this outcome with the aim of advancing our theoretical knowledge so we might get it right next time, in time to avoid conflict.

Favorited!

We have this. Certain civilizations can wipe us out at the push of a button.

The players who aren't in that same realm have to hope those that are do the right thing.

Fighter jets aren't going to help.

Naturally. What we haven't done before is invested in tools. We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.

> The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes.

I'm not suggesting war or deterrence can be obsoleted. Human nature is what it is.

What if for every $1 trillion of sticks, we had $1 trillion of carrots?

50 years from now, what if the 3rd generation carrots scaled better than the sticks, which don't scale at all?

you need total consensus down to the last man for pacifism to work. works great in groups of 10 people, not so much with groups of 2 billion: you need to credibly threaten the insane yelling person while making sure you're not the insane yelling person yourself

> there are going to be a lot more disruptions without the US military to stabilize things

Or, you know...

there are going to be a lot fewer disruptions without the US military to destabilize things

That's like saying "wars start when someone thinks they can get something out of it" Well, that's meaningless.

The idea that simply having a lot of weapons handy stops wars is absurd. That's what we learned in WW1. Simply put "Si vis pacem, para bellum" has been trash for 100 years.

Wars happen for many reasons, even when people think they might lose the war!

- Ethnic strife (the Yugoslav wars) - Humanitarian reasons (NATO intervention in Yugoslavia) - They think that the other side would give in for a settled peace (Japan in WW2; Japan knew it could not completely defeat the US) - Leaders want power and develop an external enemy (Hitler) - Leaders think they will be limited (pretty much everyone in WW1)

We could go on.

Wars are a tool for different aims. Winning is obviously the goal, but wars don't happen like in video games like Civilization where you weigh the pros and cons of how many cities you want to capture and decide it's worth it.

Nowadays, even radically successful wars are very unreliable means for achieving anything, and wars almost never improve a state's economic situation or power. If Germany had not started WW2, but had instead rested on its greater population and industrialization to increasingly dominate regional politics, you'd see a europe like the one we have today, except even more Germany-centric.

Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and Adolf Hitler are all examples of weak leaders at the helm of fragile states, throwing the dice repeatedly and basically hoping they get a continual role of sixes until their domestic position is secure. Predictably, it basically never works out. There are almost no examples of successful annexations in today's world: gains are typically temporary, and basically never pay for themselves.

So in the world we live in, where war is basically never a sensible strategy for any goal, you can prepare for peace by, you know, preparing for peace - provided that you have no nutso neighbors. In which case, it's worth joining some kind of joint treaty organization. Which is why everybody does this.

PS: A second thing is, it's no use having a ton of outdated equipment. The USSR had a lot of trouble in WW2 because they had been arming up for too long. It's often better to move to a war footing just a few years before things get hairy than it is to keep massive amounts of obsolete weaponry sitting around.

In fact, I think it's already proven to not have worked in the case of China. Despite the amount of money flowing into the country over the past 2 decades, their ambition and their tension with their neighbors have only grown. They're on their way to becoming a military superpower as well.

Individuals who dedicate their lives to violence and aggression in the way that superpowers do are committed to institutions.

It's absolutely true that weapons can be tools for peace, but I don't think that is how the projects in Afghanistan and Iraq played out. Even with the best intentions the fact that it is a military operation planned by military leaders and staffed by trained military personnel means that you're going to get particular kinds of approaches.

I think the suggestion is to approach these projects as an equivalently resouced mission with different aims and led by different people and to see if the balance of resources they would choose would be different.

There's a reason why the french and the british were so reluctant to start WW2 - the first world war was completely devastating to their societies, and it didn't even improve their security, since Germany was able to relatively quickly rebuild and rearm.

If you want peace, you should build less aircraft carriers and be more pragmatic about immigration.

People around the world are all for the Pax Americana, but only as long as they are granted a shot at the American dream too.

Many people in the US are just banking on the luck of being born within the invisible borders. People elsewhere will resent the US and the entire concept of Pax Americana when they see objectively dumb people having net worths in the 7 figures just because a rising American tide lifts all the American boats while at the same time the Government raises barriers to entry to make it harder for much more worthy would be boat owners to get access to such prosperity.

Germany is pretty much the go to case. They lost WW1, then the American hegemony financially repressed Germany through external debt so they had a pretty good reason to start a new war.

The death of the idea that power and suppression leads to peace is what has stopped world war 3. When WW2 ended, USA immediately turned Germany into an ally and economically supported it as much as it could with the Marshal Plan. It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought peace, it was cooperation.

IRAQ WAR (2003-2011)

WAR IN AFGHANISTAN (2001-PRESENT)

GULF WAR (1990-1991)

VIETNAM WAR (1959-1975)

KOREAN WAR (1950-1953)

This is ignoring an entire array of coups, rebellions, brutal suppressions and subjugations encompassing basically every country in South America

The last 70 years have only seemed peaceful because your the one doing the genocide this time around. Most of the rest of the world would like you to chill.

Also, stealth should never work alone, it should work in coordination with non-stealth aircraft, drones and stand off jammers as a coherent whole. Detecting stealth aircraft is easy, detecting stealth aircraft against massive background noise from a wall of jammers while missiles and drones are going after your radars is a lot harder.

There's no hiding in space, US, Russia and China have all demonstrated abilities to destroy satellites. In a significant war between any of those three nations those satellites will be gone in a week, maybe even a day.

There's also the class of "Loitering munition", which was used to great effect in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/loitering-munitions-pre...

I think things might get a bit crazy in the next century with climate change creating a lot of additional pressure, so I don't mind living in a well-armed Western Bloc, but that does not mean I have to ignore the incredible waste. I remember a Youtube summary/satire about the Bradley vehicle development, as an example for how it works (although it really shouldn't): https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA --- and that is before senators get involved who are concerned about getting and keeping spending for their state.

I'd love to see the EU more militarily independent from the US. Especially because they tend to start wars for economic reasons. Sponsoring the military industrial complex, oil reasons.. In Europe we view the military more as defense and not as a geopolitical or economical tool. We also view joining the military more as a job and less as a duty to our country. But if EU countries start opting out it'll never happen.

We can still be friends with the US, but less military ties would be appreciated IMO.

The MDBA Meteor (European AMRAAM competitor, generally viewed as the best beyond visual range air to air missile (BVRAAM) currently) has been in service since 2016, but won't work on F-35s until ~2026. For comparison, it only took ~1.5 years to integrate the Meteor on UK Eurofighters.