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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Some people defend war spending by saying that it leads to, say, medial advances. Seems to me that you can fund medical research without spending a trillion dollars sending humans around the planet, causing another trillion in infrastructure damage, air-conditioning tents in a desert, blowing limbs off the aforementioned humans, flying them home and then still spending the money on the research to fix them (and in the US especially, then also denying these hard-won fruits of this whole taxpayer-funded endeavour to the taxpayers).

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The point of military spending is to prevent war by creating a strong deterrent that encourages diplomacy. It’s not to start wars, that’s why it’s called defense spending. (I’m not arguing the US always does this right.)

The continental united states is surrounded by two friendly neighbors that are not a threat to us. We are separated from our nearest peer adversaries by thousands of miles of ocean, and their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.

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.

If that happened, we'd invade ourselves to prevent such a country from developing.

> their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.

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.

It's not our 'job' to be the world police. We've been effectively subsidizing social spending in LATAM and europe for decades now. Other countries would simply have to increase their defense spending as necessary to keep themselves safe.

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.

I doubt you'll find anyone who believes that it's ideal that the US is solely or primarily responsible for world peace, but it is an important role that we play. Further, not only is it morally reprehensible to allow the world to fall into chaos on the basis that "we ought not have to" as we retreat within our own borders, but it violates our own self-interest--as our partners fall, we become weaker economically and militarily, which leaves us vulnerable to attack.

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.

Last I saw we spend 3.7% of our gdp on defense, and most of our allies are spending like half that much. Must be nice to spend on your populace while you rely on uncle sam to have your back.

I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.

We cannot decouple our own security from that of our allies, but yes, they should shoulder more of the burden.

Europe disarmed massively after WW2, understandable if you look at scale of the damage that was done. That left the US as the bouncer (street name: NATO) for the West, an arrangement that's probably by and large worked, some questionable misadventures on foreign shores notwithstanding. WW2 is no longer relevant and Europe should rearm and share the defense burden, even Germany. Ideally there'd be no defense burden at all, and a defense budget of $0, but if you neglect it then, even in enlightened 2022, you get raped and pillaged c.f. Ukraine.

I hope you are prepared for many more russian and/or china backed regimes in africa/se asia. This would put any ressource extraction/trade from these regions in the hands of Putin/Xi.

Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.

If it doesn't happen to US citizens on US soil, it's not our place to directly intervene with boots on the ground. We can manage international relations with diplomacy and trade.

ICBMs make this a moot point

Which is why we would have nukes, a national guard sufficient to defend the homeland, and little else.

So give away the strength of the dollar and the ease of international trade?

Our military has nothing to do with the strength of the dollar. That is totally reliant on the strength of our economy.

> Our military has nothing to do with the strength of the dollar. That is totally reliant on the strength of our economy.

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.

That doesn't work when you have a belligerent who needs to get itself into conflicts every 15 years to keep its experience levels up and foment conflict abroad in the "off season" to support its MIC.

Considering how frequently we put our weapons of war to use ruining the lives of poor people around the world I would say that theory has been disproved. The US is virtually always at war.

What do people think happens if the US withdraws from the global theater and doesn’t maintain its military capabilities? Do we really think that Russia or China would settle for regional skirmishes, and the world would be at peace? The US is very often at war, but there are greater evils than the US bombing ISIS even with the commensurate civilian casualties (hint: few other military powers are so scrupulous about civilian casualties).

You might want to research the contacts, support, decisions and occurrences regarding the US administration and ISIS. And that's just regarding an organization you mentioned. We would lose count if we started listing the countries the US willingly destroyed in cold blood.

this is a tad naive to say the least

> Some people defend war spending

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.

What peace time? The US has pretty nearly continuously been in some military action or another for the past hundred years.

Peace is relative. The US has not had war on its own territory since the Civil War, so the civilian population has experienced peace for over 150 years.

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.

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