I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.
The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
I mean, Russia invades and China taunts its neighbors pretty regularly, so clearly their military is focused on more than defense from the US (as if we have any interest in an offensive war against them in the first place). The US military keeps those countries in check, so of course they focus on how they can “defend” against our military. The extent to which Russia and China are scheming against the US military is the extent to which they aren’t invading their neighbors, which is precisely the value the US military provides, and indeed that Russia is invading Ukraine is a failure of the US government to respond firmly to previous invasions (no, not direct military conflict with Russia).
The idea that the US or the world can enjoy meaningful peace while withdrawing from the global theater is dangerously naive. There’s no world in which we pull back without oppressive dictatorships rushing to fill the void.
I don't think there is any role for the US military beyond defending US soil. I'm tired of propping up our bloated military industrial complex on the premise that we are solely responsible for world peace.
A shared responsibility for world peace probably looks more like "more involvement from our NATO partners" (which we're actually beginning to see now that Europe is waking up to the fact that their peace is a property of NATO protection rather than some foregone conclusion). It decidedly doesn't look like the US dramatically shrinking defense spending (the US only spends 3% of its GDP on defense and that's on track to fall to 2.7% by the end of the decade), but more likely having our partners increase their own contributions and involvement.
I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.
Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.
The strength of the dollar is all about beating whoever disagrees with its role as the oil exchange currency to submission, because that is its current base for its demand. Libya was not invaded because the West suddenly remembered that Kandafi is a dictator. Iraq was not invaded because suddenly WMD were found (did they ever find another tale to cover their reasons?), Syria was not made into anarchy because the West wanted the Syrian people to be free. They all had one common point near the time of invasion. So yes the military does play a big role.
I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime as "peace spending" not "war spending".
Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine, at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait), some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries have enough military might during peacetime to make would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
During WW1 and especially WW2, the US military was employed to nearly maximum capacity, in other words, 1945 was the last time the military was in a state of all-out war.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the military was partially committed to the wars, maybe around 25% of 1945's commitment. I would label these limited wars.
The invasion phases of the two Iraqi wars as well as the invasion phase in Afghanistan saw similar levels of mobilization, but these were over so quickly they would be more like skirmishes.
And for the rest, I would label them as little more than policing of occupied territories.
(All of the above from the US perspective, from the perspective of the adversary, several of the above were total wars.)
If you look at the death toll, WW2 cost 0.4% of the US population at the time. The Vietnam and Korean wars cost less than 0.1% of the population each, and the rest hardly register.
Compare that to the 5%-20% death toll of many European countries during WW2, and similar numbers for numerous other wars through history, and you get a perspective of how peaceful the US has been since the Civil War.
Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around. Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds. So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different.
And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites). This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.
My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network.
Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war!
Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military.
[0] - https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-u...
True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting fighter jet.
The regular person will not care about technical stuff like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting yet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-ty...
And
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-wa...
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang
Looks like useful output to me.
I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe like the James Webb.
I mean he explicitly said it was not the only factor...
NASA is essentially part of the broader US defense organization and operates in extremely close collaboration with defense agencies using largely the same methods, contractors, and funding. Major NASA projects are largely indistinguishable from major weapons projects, and most of the time the two are closely interrelated in that both use technology developed by the other. Sometimes this is more informal (since the same contractors perform both) but sometimes it is quite formal, e.g. multiple defense satellite systems have been developed in parallel with scientific systems so that the design effort can be shared.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
That's not at all what GP is saying. Government investment into industries have different return on investment. This is why governments heavily invest into healthcare. But, if we're talking investing in a military vs. university researchers, I think you have to be fairly elitist to say that adding 100,000 academics is better for society than providing a good life for 1M soldiers. At its core, military spending is the greatest experiment of UBI ever done. Now, downvotes from the left and right.
I agree with what you see. You see 1M soldiers (freeloaders?) and their salaries, housing, and healthcare provided 'free' by taxpayers.
The problem is what you don't see, or as they say in French, ce qu’on ne voit pas!
Shortly after, the US begins covert assistance and operations in Vietnam (which ended up involving the USA, USSR, PRC etc etc.)This continued until 1975.
The US had a brief break from overt warfare until Grenada in the 80s, followed quickly by Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Since then it's been pretty much continuous warfare by US troops to this day.
Just because we don't see it on the news every night, US servicemen are fighting in Africa, in the Middle East, and obviously the Navy is present in almost all the oceans in significant levels.
Sure the USN enables free trade. And I have no issue with a well-funded navy, with clear goals and objectives. But the rest of the military is bloated beyond reasonable belief, committed to tasks that are undemocratic, and as others have pointed out, when you have a large, expensive military, the temptation to use it irresponsibly is high.
If my comments are coming across as endorsing the entirety of the US military and that it is infallible, that was not the intent. I mostly just called people elitist for claiming that academic pursuits are more worthy of funding than the equivalent defense expenditure on the sole basis of academic=good and soldier=bad. Based on my other comments, you can see that I even believe that the technological progress spurred by defense needs is greater than throwing the same amount of money at research.
Exhibit A - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
> the US was doing something it didn't need to do in order to defend itself
Note the negation.
Paying people to churn butter by hand non stop would probably be more of a contribution, or doing actual UBI.
What about police and firefighters? They don't "produce" anything but you need them.
You mean the other group of freeloaders on some other part of the marble flying through the black night?
Every defence dollar (or any other government spending) comes from taxes that could have been spent or invested and which would have also created jobs.
There’s no evidence that government spending causes a net gain in jobs.
Every time someone tells you that a new government spending program is creating jobs, they’re only telling you half the story.
WW1 we went home, and 20 years later things heated up. WW2 we stayed and it's been fairly peaceful since.
The DoD and NASA work together so much on missiles and avionics it isn't funny.
https://www.nrel.gov/workingwithus/defense-partnerships.html
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/23...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-us-space-force-estab...
etc, etc, etc. NASA's wind tunnel was used to help design DoD missiles. The two have always worked hand in hand.
With $1.7 trillion dollars you could, for example, give every household in the country a small rooftop solar array (@ ~$10k/ea).
We as Americans pay based on US salaries, US cost of living, etc.
This is why many choose to use Military Purchasing Power Parity (MPPP) [1] instead.
MPPP can explain why the USSR had at one point a truly gigantic force regardless of the spend.
This explains part of the story around how huge China's military force is becoming [2]
Another element to consider is how much of the entire US government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and US industry could be operationally controlled by the US Commander-in-Chief during wartime. China for example could be expected to have unity of command across the board. We wouldn't, despite things like the Defense production Act [3]
Yet one other factor is the amount of unidentified military units, such as China's Fishing Fleet [4] (Chinese Maritime Militia) that serve as a somewhat disguised extension to their Navy. For force parity comparisons, you'd have to total up their Navy, their coast guard, and their CMM fleet.
[1] https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-pari...
[2] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-colossal-scale-of-...
[3] https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-covert-naval-fleet...
Like all this money the government spends on military isn't just suddenly vanishing into thin air a lot of it gets put back into creating jobs, and the communities. Now there may be a lot more that gets diverted through seventeen layers of subcontractors, and more useless bureaucracy than you can shake a stick at but it isn't just being used for a useless purpose.
An infinite amount, in the long run.
Lots? JWST is a schoolbus-sized pile of high-precision high-tech parts, never mind the construction of new facilities to test, transport it. LIGO and friends require substantial construction, colliders are huge construction projects before they're scientific instruments, ...
If there's a productive project that costs billions, it's going to employ a lot of people.
>wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
We have over the last 10 years. Now we need a grid scale battery race as we are realizing that all the green energy in the world is useless if we can't store it.
Most of us realized this 20-30 years ago.
Assuming your average of 10,649 is correct, it's the entire taxable output for a year from 0.652% of the average tax of the tax paying population.
939,055/144,000,000 = 0.00652122
Once when I lived in Denver, I was commuting into downtown when a string of big fat jerks with HOMELAND SECURITY on their vests just walk in the middle of 15th and forcing traffic to just stop because they needed another snack. Not like "big guys" but just fat, rude, Larry the Cable Guy looking assholes with big guns slung around their shoulders.
This is coming from a pro-cop, pro-gun kinda guy... fuck this breed of people entirely and their way of life.
</rant>
However, given that Russia is using chips from laundry machines and microwaves (the type of information that makes me seriously question their hypermissile claims), I do think that we are getting great results if you ignore bang for buck.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/how-this-us-made-176000-anti...
We weren't the world's police pre-1941 and had to be pulled into WWII kicking and screaming, not by some moral obligation.
https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us....
USA doing embargo now, though on an energy rich country. Germany still eager to take that energy, though.
A lot of that crew would call themselves Marxists, no doubt. Maybe not "commies" if you mean they're not shipping people off to gulags, ok.
> Nationalism isn’t the same as Nazism.
I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a Marxist for certain. What he practiced was Totalitarianism.
The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". You could argue they were influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the Jews.
Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
> I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
I doubt that very much.
If only that were true...
It's a slippery slope though. sometimes governments pick winners on non-scientific grounds.
I wonder if maybe tax breaks might be a better way of funding, because folks who have ownership could be better.
You dropped the ball on the SSC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
Blue-sky science/hard science is not a financial instrument that you can reasonably expect to generate a 10x ROI on a predictable timeline, that's why it's blue-sky research, but it's nonetheless extremely important.
Due to the lack of an immediately apparent profit incentive, it's one of those things that more or less has to be socialized or it doesn't happen. If there was an expectation of this leading to a better kleenex within 5 years then for-profit enterprises would already be doing it. But there isn't, yet there are still scientifically important questions to be answered by performing the research.
"Most Americans think NASA’s $10 billion space telescope is a good investment" in case you missed it.
So to answer your question: the expected return is fundamental/hard science being performed that will lead to potential (but unknown) improvements to our understanding of astronomy, physics, and generally speaking our understanding of the fundamental fabric of our universe.
It's also unclear why you replied to me if your comment was directed at the title of the article and not to anything I said in particular.
Sheesh, typical Hacker News, like you really really needed someone to personally explain the concept of blue-sky/hard-science? Good afternoon to you too, mister roboto.
The point is that I disagree that it is a good investment. The investment is gambling with unfavorable odds - we're hoping we get something out of it. Even if we learn something new from astronomy..so what? There are many problems on earth that could use $10B or more of NASAs space budget that have direct impact on lives.
Knowledge?
How would you value the early experiments that eventually led to, say, germ theory on a monetary basis?
What did spending billions getting to the moon get us, bragging rights? What tangible benefit have we gotten from the space station and other space missions?
> Well-known products that NASA claims as spinoffs include memory foam (originally named temper foam), freeze-dried food, firefighting equipment, emergency "space blankets", DustBusters, cochlear implants, LZR Racer swimsuits, and CMOS image sensors.
Plenty more in this well written list:
Relativity gives us GPS, for example.
However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
It is fully within the realm of possibility that a future OSAM mission will be capable of hitting far more distant points, since the Lunar stuff is just starting to heat up.
You mean like roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?
I like to view nice pictures of space as well as anyone else, but I can't agree that it is money well spent. If it was entirely privately funded it wouldn't be a problem, but money from taxes should go for the things that benefit society the most.