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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

> Soldiers will need to go fight either way for defensive purposes and they need to be trained

"Defensive purposes" is one hell of a creative license. You know it when soldiers "need to go fight" on the other side of the world "for defensive purposes". Or when a random someone enters your home with a gun "for defensive purposes". When was the last time a US soldier was called to arms to defend their own country?

> can't any development environment be potentially used for ethically gray purposes?

Any development can and will probably eventually be used as such. But while Facebook's "gray area" is siphoning and monetizing users' data, the US military's "gray area" is invading countries and killing a whole lot of innocent people in the process. So many that they have to threaten everyone else in the world with deadly action if they even try to look too closely. That's one soft definition of gray.

Imagine the NSO Group claiming "software development gray area" to defend themselves. And with any military the moral/ethical objection will go far beyond that because no matter how the rules are followed, the main purpose of a military is to achieve things by threat or application of deadly violence. So a general objection to cooperating with the military complex will always have a solid foundation.

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> the US military's "gray area" is invading countries and killing a whole lot of innocent people in the process

Or, you know, being by far the largest reason (outside of the Ukrainians themselves) that Ukraine is able to protect itself from an evil war of aggression and not face Holodomor v2...https://www.statista.com/chart/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine...

The Ukrainian "Saint Javelin" even has one of these training modes being discussed (I don't actually know if it was made using Unity, but it sure looked like it)

Gray area.

As a European, I feel very thankful that the US has given up many of the luxuries (health care, social security, paid time off by law) we have here to fund a military to protect the world. My country has 2 fighter jets and a tank with a flat tire (hyperbole) and really depends on this. I've been vocally critical of the US defense spending, but through the Ukraine war have come to a realization we've all been spoiled and naive and feel like Europe really needs to pick up defense spending and not just in the short term.

I think the US could afford both proper health care/social security and the current military, but of course they would have to try it first to see if it works...

I was about to say it could fully defund the military and still not fully tackle healthcare and poverty problems. Especially if interest rates on government debt starts going up.

I think it's possible too, and I'm sure the military can/always is trying to cut money corners where it can so as to keep within budget, but I'm sure it all comes down to some massive cut in the military likely requiring us to decommit from some massive objective we currently are ahead on. Making sure we have enough presence to keep the South China Sea open, have enough equipment to give to countries we are allied with who have large enemies (see Ukraine, Taiwan), hold on to allies in strategic regions (see Israel - though I don't agree with what they do with equipment), be prepared for self defense or "necessary wars", be prepared to deploy to Europe because they underspend, maintain the nuclear arsenal so there's no catastrophe there, etc etc. No one wants to be the president who cut the budget so we lost in that field.

> I'm sure the military can/always is trying to cut money corners where it can

I doubt it. When the budget is billions of largely unaudited dollars and a senate that will approve any budget increases what reason is there to save money? I can’t imagine the nepotism found in military contracts are saving the military money when these companies gaining the contracts want as much tax-payer money as possible.

The US pays about 5x per health service used compared to the OECD. Every reduction in spend would result in massive job losses in overhead that keep our house of cards from collapsing.

The reality is our debt servicing (interest) will outpace our military spending soon.

The US has the world's largest entitlement and social welfare programs, including its vast Social Security program (which is not actually paid for in full by its recipients, it's heavily subsidized, ie a welfare transfer) or eg its $120 billion EBT food program. And that's just at the federal level, the US has another gigantic government complex at the state level.

Most US government spending, $10 trillion (federal + state + local), goes to social welfare programs and entitlements.

That $10 trillion is larger than the entire economies of Japan + Germany combined.

The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, by far. It hasn't given up anything.

The poorest 1/4 of the US population gets entirely free healthcare, and it's the most expensive free healthcare that you'll find anywhere on the planet. Another quarter of the US population receives directly subsidized healthcare.

Over-spending on the US military is a $200-$250 billion problem. The US spends $4+ trillion on healthcare every year.

Practically every full-time employee (32 hours or more per week) in the US gets paid time off. Your average retail store employee - working at CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc - earning ~$13-$17 / hour typically accrues 10-14 days of PTO per year (one can certainly argue it should be more; pretending it doesn't exist, or using "by law" to devalue its existence, is absurd).

Don't forget them lucky 1/2 percenters who get free healthcare, food, residence, and leisure time! I'm talking about the incarcerated 1.7m in the Land of the Free.

Close, but it's actually a bit over 700/100k, so >0.7% of the population.

Yeah this isn’t a money problem it’s an inefficiency problem at this rate. There are systemic problems here (of the systems engineering kind not the racial justice kind).

The US could have both a large military and decent universal health care. We choose to have an economically exploitive healthcare system and retirement with the politicians we elect.

It would cost the US less as a society to have universal healthcare rather than the horror we have now.

> Gray area.

I'm sure you believe you set something straight but you did not. Two things can be true at the same time and still not be in any kind of gray area.

Can you get out of a murder charge by saving someone else's life? Walk into a hospital and save one patient's life while stabbing the other to death? Rape someone but then give them a job that provides for everything? Pay for the preservation of an endangered animal only after you get the chance to kill some of the very same animals? You think Harvey Weinstein didn't pay the tuition or put a roof over one of his victim's heads? Yeah, think of him in the gray area.

Can you give me your example above and proudly proclaim "grey area" without sounding like the kind of person who thinks any wrongdoing gets wiped with a gesture of good will?

P.S. Gray should be the thin border where white and black touch and intermingle, not the whole damn thing except the white/black edges. That might ebb and flow and drift with generations and society but this moment is not it.

Can we decide that saving a victim from violence by applying violence to an aggressor is net positive? Yes, absolutely

Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you? Yes, absolutely it is a trick question.

Are you aware of any case where the US went to war under pretenses known to be false from the start, or interfered in the internal affairs of another country to cause loss of life, or allied with countries that committed terrorism against the US and others, etc. and none of the initiators suffered any consequences?

It's bad enough that morals can be twisted enough to justify just about anything and in any condition, and education these days lets anyone think they can justify anything simply by the fact that they said it. Don't add hypocrisy to that too.

>Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you?

Of course, I do. Not to say I don't have biases, or that I'm always have an access to 100% correct information. Life's not that easy, of course, but it still doesn't mean that it's always blurry, relative, and let's do nothing as your nihilist approach suggests.

This would justify any number of attacks on the US.

They can certainly give it their best shot if they want to deal with the consequences. That's how the world actually works. Institutions like the UN are almost entirely powerless when it comes down to it, while eg NATO or the various militarily powerful nations are not. You can witness that with what has gone on in the invasion of Ukraine, what has the UN stopped or prevented? Nothing. The same will hold true when China invades Taiwan one day.

The countries with potent military capabilities dictate how everything goes in this world. It was true a thousand years ago, it was true a hundred years ago, and it's true today. It will always be true, for very obvious reasons.

Ok. Where did I say anything to the contrary.

And then when in your 'aggressive defense' you end up hurting somebody else who now uses the exact same logic to start attacking you? This is how war (and terrorism) perpetuate endlessly.

It only ends when one side or the other, and anybody who might have empathized with them, is completely annihilated or when somebody stops behaving, from their perspective, righteously. Neither option is probable, which is why society just keeps replaying history on an endless loop in history, with little more than technology offering a change of scenery.

If you want to see what will happen tomorrow, simply learn about what happened yesterday. The only trick is realizing what role you're playing.

We have historical experience which pretty clearly shows that not increasing the price of aggression surely doesn't stop it. Contrary to what feel-good gurus say about "breaking the cycle of violence", in real life, it only breaks when the price of continuing is getting too high. And yes, when it comes to war it's definitely not a fairytale with all good men rewarded, and bad men punished. So if you wanted to say to that war is bad - I think almost nobody would oppose it. Not answering with weapons to weapons means there will be more of it, however.

Society breaks down if we follow this principle.

I feel they set it straight. You, on the other hand, don't seem to commit to any point but instead digress wildly between one half-baked example to the next with a postscript that could as well be a theory on color science.

We've been trying to avoid US soldiers fighting Russian soldiers for decades now; it'll look a lot worse than the Holodomor v2 if nukes start flying.

Given that they aren't, I suspect we'll find that US soldiers aren't technically involved in the fight in Ukraine. It is ironic that even now, US soldiers are only deployed for aggressive purposes.

US soldiers during the post WW2 era are overwhelmingly deployed for non-directly aggressive purposes in fact. They're deployed as a standing deterrent to regimes looking to conquer other nations.

That includes in Japan, South Korea and various nations in Europe (Germany, Italy, Poland, et al.). By the hour, those locations have seen the largest and longest-term US military deployments in its history. They're not there to start wars, they're there to deter the aggressors (Russia, North Korea, China primarily) from attempting to conquer their neighbors and annex more territory.

Russia and Ukraine had many disagreements since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The moment that relations really took a turn for the worse was after Ukraine started flirting with NATO and to a lesser extent EU, at which point Russia took Crimea and tensions started in the East.

Ukraine then continued to align and train with NATO, the Minsk accords failed and Russia invaded. At this point, our best understanding is that they wanted to enact quick regime change and re-align the country’s position to Russia. As to your reference to Holodomor 2, there’s no indication that they wanted to commit genocide or force a large scale famine.

Russia’s actions in Georgia, Belarus or Crimea itself indicate the more likely fate of Ukraine. Of course the problem with an escalation spiral is that there’s no telling where it will end up. Still, considering that Ukraine’s allowing gas exports to transit their country and Russia’s allowing grain exports, the relation is not as hopeless as you make it seem.

As for the US’s contribution to the Ukraine war effort, paradoxically, the US support and NATO courting them were likely an important trigger of the invasion. And the US support which enabled Ukraine’s resistance means that it’s now trapped in a spiral of violence with Russia that is tearing both countries apart.

We can’t know what could have been, but looking at other neighbors of Russia’s an alternative reality where Ukraine remains corrupt, poor, in Russia’s sphere of influence but whole is not unlikely.

Holodomor is some propaganda though. Everyone involved thought is was going do great things, and it failed because modernism wasn't as great as expected

The soldiers have no say what missions or assignments they are put on. They do, however, have families and lives and dreams they would like to return to. Isn’t it ethical to allow these individuals to increase their chances to return home, regardless they f what command assigns them to do and whether those plans in and of themselves are ethical?

> When was the last time a US soldier was called to arms to defend their own country?

The right way to think about defending one's country is that it means "defends the interests of the country", which can include helping allies, keeping trade routes stable, etc.

Good read: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-importance-of-u-s-mil...

Sure, if you are into the whole imperialism thing.

There is no clear limit to that expanded definition though.

Yeah, may as well do away with the concepts of offence and defence and just call it fighting.

Would you also say that the Russian army is defending the country by invading Ukraine?

Good question. I think that if Russia stationed troops in strategic places (with those countries’ permission) and/or retaliated in response to an actual attack on their country, then yes.

However, as far as I know, neither of those happened and the rationale I’ve heard reported is a mix of “that Land is really Russian land and Ukrainians are not a historically separate nation” or something like that.

I think what is truly immoral is the cynical and barbaric targeting of civilians, seemingly systematically and not isolated incidents.

My impression is that Russia isn’t doing this for defense reasons but rather for glory of the leader.

What do you think?

You might have narrowed your own definition of "defend" before answering.

> ...the main purpose of a military is to achieve things by threat or application of deadly violence.

Are you against the U.S. military in particular or all militaries? This part makes me think the latter.

I don't think it's all that controversial or ethically dubious to believe, in general, that militaries need to exist and that they therefore need to train their members on how to operate weapons.

More specific arguments against particular militaries and particular weapon systems are more interesting.

At any rate, some of the "things" that militaries achieve are good, necessary and, arguably, properly achieved by violence and the threat thereof. Such as protection from external threats of tyranny (surely we can all think of one contemporaneous tyrant with a military?).

That means, I think, involvement in conventional weapons systems for some military can be fine. In the case of the U.S. military, I could see objecting in particular, but I wouldn't predict any real impact to U.S. foreign policy due to that sort of personal choice. The main benefit would be on a personal and, depending on the circles you travel in, social level.

I am not against any military, I understand their role in the modern world. I can also simply recognize the moral and ethical objections to collaborating with any of them. This being said, in the "civilized" world (the "us" in us vs. them) the US military went above and beyond when it came to providing extra reasons to have such moral objections.

Your opening lines seem yo be in contradiction with the ending.

Your opinion is valid and understandable, but has no bearing on top-level commenters career decisions.

And nobody here really has any solid ground to defend the US in those instances where they have morally slipped, but nobody has any right to say the US should not have a military because of those instances.

> has no bearing on top-level commenters career decisions

Of course not! Nothing I say here is aimed at influencing career decisions. OP's life choices are their own.

I clearly targeted 2 ostensibly objective statements. One was the creative interpretation of "defense" (attacking a country on the other side of the world even for reasons known to be fabricated cannot be called "defense"), and the second was the attempt to call everything "a gray area" to muddy the waters (thus homogenizing and conflating writing software that tracks the websites you visit with helping train the people potentially dropping bombs on weddings).

Your job choice is yours alone to make. I can only express disagreement if I were to make it for myself. But I can certainly have a strong objection to redefining or twisting facts to justify that choice. That's not only a transparent attempt of making the choice more palatable in the eyes of others but explaining it like that ironically has the opposite effect.

The US military is an imperial army is purpose is to ensure that Americans can profit from doing bad things to poor people. It also ensures trade between rich people, again so that Americans can profit from it.

Imperial armies are both useful and immoral. It's not that it's american that makes it bad, its that it's job is empire

The US military was never large until European wars forced the issue thus causing among other things the end of the British Empire and the liberation of India. Do you really think that keeping India British would be a positive thing?

Past mistakes of militaries does not mean militaries should be abolished. Just like past mistakes of police does not mean police should be abolished (they'd just be renamed to something else).

You can be upset by past actions of the US military (or any) without calling for GP to quit his job.

I would be happy in a peaceful world, but a world without defense capabilities is a world of helpless people, not peaceful ones.

Elected officials decide where the military goes, so the criticism as to where soldiers are sent needs to be directed to the right place.

And yes, there are certainly civilian deaths that are caused by the US military making the wrong decisions about how to achieve the objectives they've been given, but even then, they can't just refuse to do the job - that's the entire point of civilian control over the military.

The people of the world, much less just the US, have a sincere interest in preventing terrorism. The functional elimination of Al Qaeda and ISIS are both two things people should be celebrating. Many countries are responsible for their elimination, and we're all better off for it.

Unfortunately, both left and right wing propagandists are agitating to make you think it was unjustified to eradicate these two groups. Don't believe that garbage. These organizations genuinely believed that the entire world has been corrupted, including much of the Muslim world, and deserved the terrorism their groups inflicted.

> have a sincere interest in preventing terrorism.

Yeah that’s why China is sending people to camps out in Xinjiang.

Also I’d love some cuttings on people defending ISIs and Al-Qaeda. The Taliban I could maybe believe, but ISIs is almost universally hated.

Isis was just doing the same thing america did to turn indigenous land into states. If they succeeded, there would be another minor power.

Arguments against Isis are that they lost. Israel is doing the same thing, and is beloved by the west for it

Eh, both are alive and well, and are just power projection tools, aka irregular forces for dirty local conflicts the big players do not want to be involved in. Terrorism it is only when the dog bites the lord who hunts.

You have a very reduced view of what defense means. When was the last time a US soldier defended his own country? In very direct manner, Afghanistan.

Indirectly, US deployments in - Taiwan, Korea, now Poland, NATO itself as an alliance, as Ukraine proves beyond any doubt - maintain peace throughout the world. In this subject the populace is often misinformed while the political and military elites in the US are quite clear - US commitments all over the world maintain peace that allows for US hegemony in trade and other areas to dominate the world's economy.

The US used to think it could be the world's most powerful country and "not get involved". That led to World War 2, and the idea died there. If the US "doesn't get involved", it will end up with another hegemon taking over Europe/Asia and lose its position at the top of the food chain. If that's what you want, go for it, cut the military budget. But when China and Russia turn the rest of the world into autocracies, you might find you made the wrong choice.

The alternative to a strong hegemon that maintains peace is clear - it's chaos and wars of domination. The relatively small slippage in power that's happened in the last 20 years have led to an imperialist war in Ukraine. If you want to have that all over the world, go for it, cut the budget and complain about all military power being "wrong".

The most violent aggressor in the world is just "maintaining peace". If that isn't doublespeak then I don't know what is.

WW2 didn't happen because the US got in late. It was much more complicated than that and driven by fascism and imperialism across the globe. It's hard to say whether anything could have prevented that war.

We should be forever grateful for the people who fought back the fascists, internal and external. But you picked one of the few instances where it made sense for the US to go to war. Wars since the last century have become so destructive and violent that people will almost never support them except they are deceived or oppressed. The solution should not be "we do the killing for you under false pretense" but to put processes in order that are based on mutual agreement.

You should read Henry Kissinger - but I imagine maybe you think he’s a war criminal?

Give it 20 years and see. A close reading of world history seems to tell me - without a strong military dominating hegemon keeping the peace, you get war and chaos.

The only war of aggression I can think of was Iraq. Vietnam was a war against an ideological enemy, wrong headed as it might have been, based off a flawed theory. I don’t consider the other wars as aggression because I don’t consider policing the world to mean you’re an agressor. The world needs policing.

> When was the last time a US soldier was called to arms to defend their own country?

I am not american so maybe I am wrong but I believe it was Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 no?

The justification, weather correct or not, was in both cases exactly what you said. To “defend their own country”.

In Afghanistan to prevent further 9/11 style attacks from being committed against the USA and in Iraq to prevent WMDs from being used against the USA. The famous/infamous “do you want the proof to come in the form of a mushroom cloud?” bit.

Again, weather the justification was correct or not is not what I am pointing out. I am pointing out in both cases, the USA called soldiers to fight “to arms to defend their own country”

How come US is the only country that needs military bases all over the world to “defend their country”?

With your justification the Russia invasion is actually to prevent a future war with NATO. I am pretty sure one can justify any war that way.

Well, no, the US is most certainly not the only country with military bases all over the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overs.... I know it’s easy to assume that because you normally only ever hear about the US army, I agree the US does have the largest number of overseas bases around the world, it’s not the _only_.

NATO is a defensive organization. How does going to war with the Ukraine help Russia avoid confrontation with NATO when invading the Ukraine puts NATO members and arms length reach away dramatically increasing the chance of a full scale conflict with NATO? This argument doesn’t make any sense.

Justify != right. Anyone can justify a war from their POV, see Russia -> Ukraine, US -> Iraq. It doesn’t make it any more right.

If you read through that page, a couple countries have bases in ~15 countries, and the US has ~50.

There is a major difference in scale.

NATO is kinda a for ensuring Ukranian independence. Minus NATO, NATO countries could get involved to help Ukraine, whereas they're currently limited by MAD

> in both cases, the USA called soldiers to fight “to arms to defend their own country”

Having a justification doesn't mean it must be a good justification. The WMD that didn't exist? Being the close ally of the country that actually supported 9/11?

Let's not keep going on the same beaten path which will not suddenly give us a different answer. For more than a century the US has been involved in affairs everywhere else in the world long before everyone else in the world was involved in any US affairs. Both 9/11 and the subsequent invasions (or the acts that came before) were just as much terrorist actions but if you creatively draw the line you can arbitrarily erase any inconvenient action that came before. If you draw the line at 2002 the invasions look unprovoked. And if you draw it in the early 1980s then 9/11 looks like soldiers defending their country against further attack. Who would you say first meddled with whom to trigger the chain of escalations that came after? But no need to dig, ask yourself as a decent human being: should you bomb a wedding and call it defense?

If you had heard as often as I have people justifying the unjustifiable (then and now) you'd understand what's the problem with arbitrary lines and pro forma justifications. I apologize if a comment box cannot support any better explanation despite the unshakeable foundation for what I said.

So interesting point of clarification. I was reading up on chemical weapons of WW1 the other day and fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I found out that technically Iraq did not have WMDs, I think I was reading about Sarin gas and the article explained that it is 80% a certain mixture and 20% of another mixture largely. It then pointed out that Iraq had those two ingredients, in the right quantities, in two separate warehouses across the street from each other. So technically they didn't have WMDs they just had everything they would need to make a WMD on short notice.

OK... so would you call any US farmer with some fertilizer and a tank of diesel a terrorist and rain bombs on them? Or is it arbitrarily reserved for countries on the other side of the world? For defense...

You know, the irony is that as long as the US and the West in general had an interest in keeping an even bigger enemy (Iran) in check, they had no moral objection to providing Iraq with all kinds of assistance, financing, equipment, materials, and training on developing the very same WMDs they later invaded Iraq for having, even if it was known they were destroyed.

But you'll always get exactly the story you need to hear to support the conclusion you should support. And you will support it because people care less and less about critical thinking, collecting available info from both sides. It's so much easier to just get the conclusion in predigested bytes, ideally just a punchline. If this kind of "thinking" is enough to make people storm the Capitol of the US, it's enough to get the to support the invasion of a dusty corner of the world most of them couldn't even point at on the map.

> Iraq to prevent WMDs from being used against the USA

This is something that was proven to be a lie. There were no WMDs, and Bush knew that there wasn't enough evidence that they existed.

> weather the justification was correct or not is not what I am pointing out

This is however entirely critical to the whole thing. Pretty much every country which has ever launched an aggressive war has claimed along the way that it was defensive or in response to provocation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai... : yup, that's Hitler claiming that it was in response to US provocation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_declaration_of_war_on... : yes, after history's most famous surprise attack there's a declaration with "Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path" on the end.

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