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Comment by kennend3 | Hacker News Reader

Call me a cynic, but this reads like the US military-industrial complex is looking for a new "enemy" that needs vast amounts of money to "contain"?

While the "war on terror" seems to be dying down, what about the good old standby enemies (Russia and China)?

They just sold 1.2 billion dollars in military hardware to Taiwan, they can milk this for another 5 years at a minimum.

I cant wait for the news stories in the future.

The UFO's have a "interstellar space ship gap" or some other real or imagined "gap" we need to close.

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That's just not how any of this works

The gap between how the government runs in actual practice, and how citizens think it runs is so large that I'm not sure we can even communicate coherently about it

Well you should roll back to the time of the missile gap, where Kissinger helped get a lot of nukes built for political reasons more than anything. Raytheon has adds on subway stations in DC for a reason. Messaging works.

I've been a senior DoD technology leader, I know how it works. I live in DC, I see the ads.

Never once has Raytheon or any other defense company tried to make me or any other PEO, acquisitions or contracting officer buy something by generating some fake scare in an attempt to make me or anyone who can actually spend money on behalf of the DoD do so (hint, there's not that many people who can actually approve real money).

People think there is some conspiracy to just grow our military for it's own sake - in fact it's almost always at the behest of a foreign partner that needs defense and is asking for the DoD to come and help them (usually via treaty or NATO request).

The reason the DoD and the US IC grows is because we are literally protecting the economic freedom of MOST of the world because they explicitly ask us to protect them. It is in our best interest to protect those who ask because the more people who are our partners and allies, the more we can increase trade and promote our way of life. Whether you think that is good or bad is up to you. However there is no secret government cabal sitting around trying to figure out some new fake reason to scare the population. There's more than enough scary things that you aren't dealing with on a daily basis because

What was the last time an American citizen seriously worried about being invaded by a foreign power or attacked by a nation state? It just doesn't even occur to the average citizen that there are about a million people working to ensure Americans don't even have to think about not being attacked by foreign power. This is true for every major nation state with a significant defense presence.

> However there is no secret government cabal sitting around trying to figure out some new fake reason to scare the population.

Except when there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

> The proposals called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba. The possibilities detailed in the document included the remote control of civilian aircraft which would be secretly a repainted US Air Force plane,[2] the possible assassination of Cuban immigrants, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas,[3] blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.[2] The proposals were rejected by President John F. Kennedy.

Thank you for bringing this up. These examples prove the point at how rare, egregious and unfruitful all such efforts to create such a cabal have been. Notably solidifying the reality that no such cabal exists.

It is true that unethical people have tried to do illegal things in the past. Gen Lemnitzer was fired as JCS and nothing ever came of it. How about when a group of traitors tried to get Gen Smedley Butler to run a coup in the Business plot?

There are always going to be people trying to seek power. The ENTIRE REASON we are structured the way we are with civilian politicians and civilian head of the DoD who are there at the will of the people is to prevent such situations and so far we've done a good job at rooting them out.

All this proves is that we need the best most ethical people running the show and it actually is important that you, the citizen, is involved in putting the right people in charge. So are you doing everything you can for your country to make sure that the best people are in charge and most importantly the functions of the system continue to act as checks on the others? Are you doing that? Have you done public service in ANY capacity? If so great, keep it up and maybe think about what you could be doing to make your system more robust and reducing similar risks.

Operation Northwoods only became public knowledge about 3 decades after JFK rejected it. If he had approved it, we might never have heard of it. There is no way to be sure what nefarious shit they're up to today that we might not hear about until the 2050s if ever.

This is what you got from his response to you, that the fact they put forward such a dumb idea to a president seems to prove no "cabal" exists?

If it did not exist, why was the dumb idea put forward? why the need to invade Cuba? Why all the other underhanded involvement in other countries over the years?

Then you list other examples of such nefarious behaviours?

Thankfully the US government does not have a serious problem with lobbying, corruption (number 27 on the world corruption index).

But sure, the fact the "bay of pigs" was discovered seems to prove things like this don't take place, yet you list Smedley of "war is a racket"?

Did anyone in the "intelligence community" or the military or the unelected bureaucrat class suffer any consequences whatsoever for the abject failures, wastes of money, and wastes of life known as "The Iraq War" and "The War in Afghanistan"?

Yes

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/kil...

Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant the people who were directly or indirectly responsible for the troops being there. Not the people who died.

> What was the last time an American citizen seriously worried about being invaded by a foreign power or attacked by a nation state? It just doesn't even occur to the average citizen that there are about a million people working to ensure Americans don't even have to think about not being attacked by foreign power.

Post 9/11, when American citizens rights were trampled in the name of "national seccuirty?

It is crazy you post what you did, stating you are a "senior DoD technology leader' and "know how it works".

So.. the "missile gap", real or imagined? If imagined, what was the purpose of allowing the US citizens to believe it was real?

U2 spy planes told the truth, US presidents did not.

Great example of what I was discussing above - you don't even know how the system works well enough to be able to analyze it. Here you have clumped the entire US government together as though it's "the military"

Anticipating your response - Everything snowden revealed was authorized under Title 50 which is NOT the military, it's the Intelligence Community. There is a difference between NSA and CSS which do different things. You can be military and work under Title 50 but with a pretty serious restrictions under EO-12333

With respect to the missile gap - it's well documented that Russia has had more nukes than anyone since at least the 70s [1]. Go look at the SALT treaty work and mutual inspections (now discontinued unfortunately) for more detail on how these estimates have changed over the years.

If you're looking to me to defend unethical politicians for lying or exaggerating you'll not find much content - however again nothing here is evidence of a consistent and coherent "cabal of people trying to scare the public" in a conspiracy to keep finding bad people. The USSR really had a huge and growing nuclear arsenal and wanted as badly as they could to beat the US at nukes. This isn't some made up bullshit like aliens.

I don't have the energy to break it down further at the moment.

[1] https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-...

Again, for someone "in the know" you simply need to read JFK's own words and not yours:

https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/forums/past-for...

"We are losing the satellite missile race with the Soviet Union," he noted, "because of complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement and wasteful rivalries and jealousies." Once in office, when it was revealed that there was no gap and that, if anything, the US was ahead, he and his military advisors still had to deal with this issue.

I thought it might be interesting and fun at the outset to hear directly from President Kennedy as he discusses the missile gap with Secretary McNamara and others in a secretly recorded taped conversation in the Oval Office. The first voice you'll hear is Robert McNamara, followed by the President. We'll put a transcript on the screen to help you follow along.

McNamara: There was created a myth in the country that did great harm to the nation. It was created by, I would say, emotionally guided but nonetheless patriotic individuals in the Pentagon. There are still people of that kind in the Pentagon. I wouldn't give them any foundation for creating another myth.

JFK: [inaudible] that missile gap, as ones of those who put that myth around, a patriotic and misguided man [laughter]

Hmm.....

This wouldn't make sense as a target. "We estimate we'll need seven quintillion dollars and it will take about seven hundred years" doesn't make for a good money-grab.

it would appear sarcasm is lost on you?

Obviously they are not going to advocate building interstellar space flight simply because some "UFO" has it.

If we could find a way to redirect the massive defense budget from squabbling over dirt into space flight I have a hard time seeing a downside.

We just need some kind of narrative to trick politicians and world leaders into doing something useful instead of war.

They're delivering weapons to Ukraine as we speak. Some other lucrative proxy wars might be coming up soon.

I'm sure they have something cooking, there's too much money at stake to just close up shop.

see, if we just elected people that wanted good government then they wouldn't waste money on boondoggles

The problem here though, is that the interstellar space aliens are smart enough to have sightings in every state, therefore insuring wide spread political support for additional funding

That would make sense if the US military-industrial complex had any problems whatsoever with funding. As far as I can see, the military and black-budget initiatives in the US already have an infinite, no questions asked credit line from the taxpayers and Congress. They don't need to resort to something this ridiculous, and even if they did, as you mentioned Russia and China are already effective boogeymen.

Not like greed has a limit. When a measurable percentage of congress is invested in conspiracy theories seems like a good time to get a bigger cut of an even darker black box.

There are some real nuts in Congress, but the ones they would really need to convince are the twenty or so on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Most of the real wackjobs are in the House of Reps, and I have a feeling the members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense are kept on a shorter leash than most of the rest. At least insofar as being well informed about defense matters is concerned.

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