Obviously, there is waste, failed projects, and pockets of dysfunction. That happens in all large organizations.
Despite all its flaws, the DOD is putting on a clinic on superior training, logistics, discipline, technology and power projection. I shudder to think what the world would look like right now and in several years without the DOD. Europe would be getting steamrolled if not for the DOD and NATO and it wouldn’t end there.
My point is a very simple one: the DoD is as large as it is because the US has a cultural aversion to accepting welfare. We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.
It would be fascinating to hear more about where you get these ideas from.
What they’re saying is very much true, I’m curious of your upbringing & knowledge of the topic if you really think they’re wrong
We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead
FWIW, the DoD employs 1.3MM active duty service members, 750k civilians, and 800k National Guard and Reserve service members [1]. That's about 3MM people, generously rounding up. If you consider the surrounding defense industry, that's about another 800k jobs [3], so let's super-generously round up to 4MM. Considering that there are 207MM working age people in the U.S. [2], I'd be surprised if there was broad support for the DoD primarily on the basis of the number of jobs it provides or as a welfare alternative. That's $800k a year per job created! Seems fairly inefficient as a job creation scheme given the median salary in the U.S. is about $54k a year [4].
And compared to the 4MM jobs in defense, in 2019 roughly 59MM Americans were the recipients of some sort of direct welfare program [5].
1: https://trumpadministration.archives.performance.gov/defense...
2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
3: https://www.clearedconnections.com/security-clearance-news/s...
4: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-f....
5: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99674/...
Depending on how you count, defense industry could be 3.5 mil employees.
https://siteselection.com/issues/2012/sep/sas-military-econo....
Although now that I think about it, that's what ROTC is right? They pay for your education, and pay you to gain experience using that education on Defense, then when your obligation is met you can keep going or do your own thing with a patriotism-boosted resume. It's a win-win
The gist of the idea is that the Department of Defense is a (the?) major funder of all sorts of industry in the US, typically in the form of contracts for products and services.
Your hand waving pessimism seems clearly unwarranted in this case. You think scholarships are just getting fired off with no one knowing who, where, or when?
At a decent guess for upper bound size, I see an estimate of 56% overall AD officers coming from ROTC. 2018 DoD demographics report puts total AD O-1 population at 28000, which should be a two year rank, so cut it in half for your new officers per year of 14000. Add 10% for people failing out, and you get about 8600 officers per year in ROTC, or a total of 34000 since it's a four year program.
Of course, using companies as a medium for propagating welfare has its own problems
What do you base this idea on? Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we... puts per-capita and per-GDP welfare spending high into the list of developed countries,
> We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it,
More than is already dumped in by the vast welfare programs? Isn't government welfare expenditure greater than the entire defense budget?
> so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
> When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.
How so? What kind of thing could an audit say that would cause the population to act in a way the ruling class or the DoD would consider undesirable? And what kind of action are you imagining?
For every bit of good the DOD does it kills, destroys and spreads enough suffering to AT LEAST nullify it if not vastly put it in the negative. That is without considering how all the money the DOD wastes on killing people and overthrowing other governments could be used to massively reduce suffering if it was put towards something more useful like infrastructure or healthcare.
You don't need the current level of US DoD spending for NATO to be effective. There are 8 European NATO in the top 20 list of military expenditures, 5 more countries who are allies while not being NATO.
But yes, Ukraine would likely be screwed.
Right. It's a $200B essential service plus a $500B jobs program.
If instead we had a modern day CCC or such where we'd actually invest in our communities, etc., we could have far more healthy and prosperous society. But no, that would be socialism if we spent it on something nice.
2 Wars with nothing to show and a cost of over $6T. We can do better than that.
Ukraine is so far another story but nobody has clue how it will evolve. And none of that military experience is getting to any actual use and is slowly evaporating, its so far just about minor logistics, some satellite espionage and some troops training (which are not negligible skills but they alone don't win wars).
Based on the article(s) it would seem there is a very simple way to make them better: Teach them accounting and require them to implement accounting controls.
Tossing half a trillion dollars into whatever the hell is a very bad way to spend government money.
I really think it would benefit libertarians to get away from this particular argument. It's applicable to everything. They're making me dispose of my trash in a receptacle at gunpoint! They're making me pick up my dog's poop at gunpoint! They're making me wear pants at gunpoint!
Of course, guns aren't involved unless things get bizarrely out of hand, but the same goes for paying taxes.
Is there a commonly accepted like... loss of producitivty/efficency number in % that is accepted at large organization scale?
Like is it just assumed "a large corporation is 20% inefficient compared to... a startup/quicker moving company" and there's nothing that can be done/it'll always be that way?
In my opinion sound money is the best thing we have to coordinate better at scale, but we are already far above what any animal species can do.
And DOD has more than just technical flaws.. the history of it's conflicts over the past 20 years leaves _much_ to be desired and the development of the world in that time has not significantly been towards peace. I'm starting to wonder if continuously projecting force for 70 years after the last major war was a wise strategy at all.
The audits are frankly the least of it.
How? Can you please elaborate a bit?
However, this assumes no game theory. If America hadn't invested as much as it did in DOD, I think it would be weaker and Europe would have to compensate and would then produce more of it's own needs.
But your point stands: it does something, it serves a purpose, it produces output, a far cry from what the guy you responded to claimed. It's not a job program, far from it.
Today also on FP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756219
We can remove corruption if we just have the political will. Assuming the politicians themselves are not part of the corruption.
https://www.cagw.org/reporting/pig-book
It identifies $8bn of pork. That’s a lot of money, but if the overall DoD budget is $800bn, then your claim is 1% true by that measure.
Is the DoD inefficient in other ways? Surely yes, but to claim it is “really just” a jobs program is unfair and teleological.
And, to be clear: I don't have any particular problem with that, at least any more so than anything about the general business of defense! I'd just prefer we be a little more honest about the financial structure.