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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It's because Americans and many Europeans under the shield of the U.S. military and have never in their lives felt a moment of fear about external threats.[1] They never have to meaningfully confront the central fact of their existence: that they enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the world's bounty in a way that would be impossible without overwhelming military power. I suspect people living in say Ukraine don't talk like this.

[1] As I get older, I'm more sympathetic to Colonel Jessup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk.

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The Colonel Jessup character was guarding a fence in Cuba. Seriously. Cuba. Imagine hearing that sanctimonious speech about "the manner in which I defend you" and then you find out it's a fence in Cuba.

There hasn't been an existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, and that one was self-inflicted. Obviously we need to maintain a military but 99% of what the current military does is either for economic goals or hollow national pride.

Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life? How can one say there are no existential threats while countries people consider "The Enemy" have enough nukes to kill all human life multiple times? Also global warming is an existential threat. It's really telling how little people care about the world's problems not seeing their very own existence endangered.

All true, I meant threats in conventional military terms which our military and public rhetoric are all centered around.

Yea I didn't consider the public rhetoric, good catch!

Same to you, trust me I'd be happy if our thinking was more centered around avoiding the real catastrophes that you emphasized.

In the case of Global Warming its happening to slowly for most people to perceive it as threatening. Even though it massively is.

For Nukes thats just a given nowadays, humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to constant threats. Not in the sense of being able to do something against it but to know it exists and not be terrified every single day. So many things can threaten human life that exist around us and yet we do not get scared after some time anymore atleast not constantly. Look at people living in Australia the entire ecosystem is basically a giant threat to anyone living there. Look at people living in earth prone regions of the world. People adapt and keep on living their lives. This is a fundamental human skill.

>People adapt and keep on living their lives.

True! This is precisely what really annoys me about humans, because it makes humans not care about many things, and it's a skill I struggle with, which causes constant anger and helplessness on my side of things. But I guess it's what allows people to have hope and being whimsical, happy and whatnot.

>Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life?

No, of course not. It's a threat to people within 15 miles of the explosion plus people who are outdoors and turn to look at the bright light in the sky.

And there's never been enough nukes to kill all human life. That statement is based on a despicable calculation in which it is assumed that people would assemble packed shoulder-to-shoulder in circles of just the right size and there are no structures or land masses to deflect the blast and no clouds or fog to absorb the intense light.

Cuba is less than 95 miles from Florida and was aligned with a hostile nuclear superpower. The possibility of using Cuba as a base of operations for an attack on U.S. soil is the closest the U.S. has ever come to a significant foreign threat.

And guantanamo bay is on the south side of Cuba, not even between Cuba and the US. There has never been fighting there over 100 years. These days it's most famous as a convenient legal location to do torture.

Aaron Sorkin unintentionally created some phenomenal performance art with the closing of that movie and various educated people seeing Jack Nicholson's character as some sort of hard defender of freedom.

> And guantanamo bay is on the south side of Cuba, not even between Cuba and the US.

Why do you think that’s relevant to the point?

It's relevant to the macho point of Jack Nicholson's character talking a bunch of shit about how he defends us. The Guantanamo base is irrelevant except, as previously noted, a convenient location to do torture.

Regarding the larger relationship.. bro, it's not the 1960s. Nobody is even trying to put nukes in Cuba and we could have easily established normal relations at any point in the last 50 years. The only reason that they are "enemies" is because we can't let go of a grudge going on 75 years that is completely irrelevant in today's world.

>> And guantanamo bay is on the south side of Cuba, not even between Cuba and the US

> It's relevant to the macho point of Jack Nicholson's character talking a bunch of shit about how he defends us. The Guantanamo base is irrelevant

You think a naval base on Cuba is “irrelevant” because it’s on the south side of the island and not the north side?

You think Cuba represents a naval threat to the mainland US? I had higher expectations for you based on your other comments.

Soviet-allied Cuba was a military threat to the U.S. in 1986 which is when the movie is set. Don’t forget the movie was written before the fall of the Soviet Union. And even when it came out in 1992, it wasn’t clear to audiences that the cold war was really over.

Is Cuba a military threat today? No. But that’s because we have had a navel base there for more than a century, and the Soviet Union is long gone.

You're missing the forest for the trees.

The scene between Colonel Jessup, Lt Jg Kaffee, and Lance Corporal Dawson and PFC Downey is about the nature of contradictory duties.

Everyone in that scene has a sworn duty to the United States as active duty military.

However, their duties sometimes conflict with each other (Jessup and Kaffee), and are even sometimes self-conflicting (Dawson and Downey).

Bad doesn't always come with a sticker labeling itself, and there's trauma inflicted even in peacetime in the maintenance of military strength (in broken bodies, training deaths, and emotional trauma).

To hold ones nose and pretend there isn't constant violence, even absent declared war, being perpetrated to militarily protect the US and Europe is to be ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the foundation peace is built on.

Jessup is a tale of the distinction between the reality of war and the higher ideals and laws of war.

I understand and respect what you're saying here, but the fly in the ointment is that this posting (gitmo) was always bullshit and never actually mattered.

Jessup is missing the forest for the trees far more than I ever could because it's not my job. He's getting kids killed for a bullshit assignment while being a Colonel.

How do you think an Afghanistan or Iraq veteran would regard the Cuba assignment?

You're missing the forest, because Jessup and the entire enlisted structure would have been rotated to their next posting in 2-3 years max.

And since Jessup seems to have been base commander for a while already, likely less than that.

The goal of the military (as a whole) is to make people substitutable per their rank and MOS.

Allowing good order and discipline to break down (as an officer, NCO, or enlisted) just because of current post is anathema to that.

More than half of US ocean shipping tonnages is to or from ports on the US Gulf Coast, and Cuba is in a position to cut off access to it if it gets helps from a bigger power.

The US has legitimate security interests in Cuba.

In EU countries where war with Russia was seen as possible, for example, here in Sweden that is not the case.

The military preparations this fear leads to take a very special form though: investment in actual defence, commitment to stay behind and fight in case on an invasion, that sort of thing.

Obviously working on defence technology is part of this, but it also shapes the direction of the defence technology you work on. Sweden's forces have looked rather different from forces that intend to conduct offensive wars, especially historically. Tanks specifically designed for conducting ambushes are one example. Artillery emplacements designed to sink invasion fleets and to resist direct nuclear attack are another.

The cold war and kids practicing sheltering under their desks never happened?

As in 2026 US army is not used for defense. It is used for offense and proudly so.

It wasn’t used primarily for defense in 1947 when it was renamed “department of defense.”

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