The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we are not), you realize that you really just help to kill people.
Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe.
The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.
Every country gets an army. The only question is: whose?
Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the German soldiers can march in the shade!
;-)
The chickens always come home to roost.
The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.
It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea.
Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.
Before them, we had two devastating world wars in the span of about three decades, with over 100,000,000 dead total. Now we’ve gone over seven decades without another.
Let’s hope the deterrent holds through the current, ongoing, and horribly irresponsible brinksmanship.
The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not a significant news event for me. Ukraine was weak, and the tepid response to the invasion from Ukraine and the rest of the West meant that Russia just rolled in without opposition or much drama.
Fast forward 8 years, and Ukraine has further developed its national identity and is starting to become a real democracy. The 2022 invasion was a big wake-up call for the West. We had thought that we had won the Cold War in 1992, and that our geopolitical rivals, while still warranting concern, were not a direct threat to us and our allies anymore. Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Russia remains a backwater with a GDP the size of Italy. They are not a significant threat to US interests, any more than Italy could possibly hope to be.
If anything, a strong America just lends a false sense of security to countries like Ukraine, which might be better off understating that they must see to their own safety and security.
Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.
Name a full member of NATO who has been invaded. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Even without NATO membership, China currently isn't occupying Taiwan. Guess why.
> Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.
Did you even read the first part of my comment? Do I sound like an apologist for the USA's recent foreign policy?
There is a lot of pork spent for the USA's military. Cost overruns and unnecessary systems abound. That doesn't obviate the need for a strong military to keep the peace for ourselves and our allies.
The world is different now than it was 100 years ago. Many counties have at least a few nuclear weapons. We can't afford to let things spin out of control. We need stability, and NATO provides a lot of that.
Name the last time a NATO country invaded another NATO member. Oh, wait, that never happened, and never will happen. That's called stability.
A lot of people will argue that defense companies want wars to break out to increase their business, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In wartime, the military mostly needs cheap commodities—ammunition, supplies, food, fuel—nothing you can really differentiate on. And especially the most recent wars have mostly been against poorly armed terrorists, when the defense industry makes a lot more money selling weapons that would be total overkill against the Taliban but potentially useful against Russia or China.
"Human operator supervises autonomous mission execution with intuitive UI/UX to enable increased understanding and decision advantage ."
https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/
When AI assisted mass target selection is already a thing:
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...
Autonomous killing tools are an obvious next step.