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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I love to admire war machines on "hacker" "news" it is such an important part of our site's culture. Technology is always morally neutral, of course, even (or especially?) if it is explicitly designed to cause death and misery.

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if you look through the comments you'll see there's little discussion of the weaponry. The fascinating thing is how huge this project is and how it has become one of the most expensive things ever built.

See this from wikipedia, for example: The JSF program was expected to cost about $200 billion for acquisition in base-year 2002 dollars when SDD was awarded in 2001.[56][57] As early as 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had identified major program risks in cost and schedule.[58] The costly delays strained the relationship between the Pentagon and contractors.[59] By 2017, delays and cost overruns had pushed the F-35 program's expected acquisition costs to $406.5 billion, with total lifetime cost (i.e., to 2070) to $1.5 trillion in then-year dollars which also includes operations and maintenance.[60][61][62] The F-35A's unit cost for LRIP Lot 13 was $79.2 million.[63] Delays in development and operational test and evaluation, including integration into the Joint Simulation Environment, pushed full-rate production decision to March 2024, although actual production rate had already approached the full rate by 2020; full rate at the Fort Worth plan is 156 aircraft annually.[64][65]

The US, and the allies to which it exports F-35s, are overwhelmingly a net force for peace in the world. There’s a reason why the phrase “Pax Americana” is so well-known. You can think of these as war machines, since they’re literally machines made for use in war — but you can also think of them as war prevention machines, causing would-be aggressors to think twice before, like, invading Singapore or some such unpleasantness.

>> force for peace

The entire Middle East begs to differ.

especially as Western made bombs fall on Gaza

On a more statistically relevant note, just note that US / Nato allies feature on like 1/3 of armed conflicts in the 21st century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars:_2003%E2%80%93pre...

No, force for peace at home. Not peace in theater. That's irrelevant /s

While I take your point, it’s interesting to note that the US seems poised to return an isolationist leader back into power, pulling funding from NATO and likely resuming a hostile attitude to China. There are many authoritarian leaders looking at how Ukraine and Israel are progressing and considering making a move of their own. Especially as supply issues and wavering political support for overseas military interventions are telling signs of weakness in Pax Americana to protect the world, with attendant peril for the global economy

Edit: Just in case it wasn’t obvious, this evolving situation is counter to the hypothesis that improving military capability means ‘world peace’, particularly when there is always asymmetry and misalignment between geopolitical forces

How do you think we won WW2? By praying?

With War Bonds and rationing of certain materials instead of debt financing them through foreign governments.

Sorry, you said won, not pay for. But the point stands. If we were to get into a conflict with China, not sure how the military industrial complex would get funded.

You could have picked a better example to counter the OP. It was the ‘war machines’ of ‘death and misery’ that began and enabled a war of such scale, and it was attrition (specifically Russian attrition) of soldiers and arms that brought it to a close.

Wars are meant to end misery and suffering.

That is always the claim of one side of each war, more often both.

Wars can be meant to end misery and suffering. Not always.

And they always cause misery and suffering, even if they are just.

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