# Building the industrial peace complex **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 11, 2025, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616 "2025-12-11T15:22:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/21 "2025-12-12T20:28:21Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > I’ve heard both of these arguments for more than 50 years and have of course read the short story. Thus my request that we simply run some numbers here. What might active national peace/civil disobedience programs cost? I feel before we address the issue of how much it would cost, we need to address the issue of whether it would be effective. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/22 "2025-12-12T20:28:52Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > I am asking, how much might active training in peaceful conflict resolution, starting let’s say in kindergarten, civil disobedience, and the like actually cost. What does “active training in peaceful conflict resolution” look like? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/23 "2025-12-12T20:30:18Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Think of the intent, obviously unclear in the op, to consider governments and business are prepared to spend billions, nay trillions, to design, invent, produce, and deploy weapons and “teach” people that violence is natural and necessary amd to glorify war. Yet they are reluctant to spend pennies to help develop other ways of conflict resolution. We have avenues for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The United Nations is probably the best known example. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/24 "2025-12-12T20:31:02Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I feel before we address the issue of how much it would cost, we need to address the issue of whether it would be effective. I don’t agree. If you asked what it would cost to rearm the entire US army with NERF weaponry equivalent to the weapons they current have (NERF drones, NERF missile launchers and tanks, NERF artillery, etc) we could address how much it would cost even as we acknowledge it would be extremely ineffective. But I don’t know what “active training in peaceful conflict resolution” classes are supposed to look like. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/25 "2025-12-12T20:32:08Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > I don’t know what they are going to do with all the money that they steal, When there is nothing left to buy, they are going to be just as jacked as the rest of us.They really haven’t thought this out. > > Their yachts will not save them. Of course their yachts won’t save them. That’s what the space ships are for. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/26 "2025-12-12T20:39:06Z")
Gonna be no where to go in either case. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/27 "2025-12-12T20:47:01Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > I don’t agree. If you asked what it would cost to rearm the entire US army with NERF weaponry equivalent to the weapons they current have (NERF drones, NERF missile launchers and tanks, NERF artillery, etc) we could address how much it would cost even as we acknowledge it would be extremely ineffective. > > But I don’t know what “active training in peaceful conflict resolution” classes are supposed to look like. But if we can’t determine how effective non-violent protest would be as a national defense, how can we determine how much it would cost? Let’s say we decide to defend the country via the use of magic. The first step is to determine how well magic works. Only after that can we determine how much magic we need and what it would cost to produce that amount of magic. Could a single wizard protect the entire country? Do we need a dedicated team of witches? Do we require the entire population to be wearing amulets? Only after we determine how much magic is needed to do the job can we start making estimates of how much that magic is going to cost. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/28 "2025-12-12T20:51:36Z")
We’ve done exactly that, and it’s wrong to say we haven’t tried. In the months leading up to February 2022, there was frenetic diplomacy by the United States and numerous other nations to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine. It had no effect at all. You simply can’t talk your way out of some problems. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/29 "2025-12-12T20:58:42Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > You simply can’t talk your way out of some problems. It’s like whispering to a bowling ball. It never listens. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/30 "2025-12-12T21:14:58Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Let’s say we decide to defend the country via the use of magic. The first step is to determine how well magic works. Only after that can we determine how much magic we need and what it would cost to produce that amount of magic. Could a single wizard protect the entire country? Do we need a dedicated team of witches? Do we require the entire population to be wearing amulets? Only after we determine how much magic is needed to do the job can we start making estimates of how much that magic is going to cost. I agree, and I said much the same above - if the OP doesn’t detail out for us what he means, then we’re forced to argue about how (in)effective it would be, because the only way to estimate cost without specific parameters is to come up with those parameters ourselves, and that requires knowing how this program is even meant to work. But one other option to address cost without effectivity is if the OP gives us detailed requirements of what he’d like to see. If he tells us that he wants armouries full of protest sign making materials in every city, an hour a day of civil disobedience classes from grades 5 to 12, and all citizens to be drafted for a three year stint of solidarity marching, we could talk about cost even if we don’t agree that any of that stuff would be worth a damn in the event of an invasion. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/31 "2025-12-12T21:16:55Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Think of the intent, obviously unclear in the op, to consider governments and business are prepared to spend billions, nay trillions, to design, invent, produce, and deploy weapons and “teach” people that violence is natural and necessary amd to glorify war. Yet they are reluctant to spend pennies to help develop other ways of conflict resolution. And again, let’s remember, I’m not saying “let’s do only this because what could possibly go wrong?” I am asking, how much might active training in peaceful conflict resolution, starting let’s say in kindergarten, civil disobedience, and the like actually cost. We seem prepared to spend billions on “zap the fuckers!” and nothing on “what’s the story here and how else might we proceed.” Is the question you want to ask “ **Why** do we teach people to fight wars and not to practice civil disobedience”? Because that’s what you seem to be getting at here. If so, you’d get better answers if you just asked that outright. Or are you genuinely interested in the cost in dollars of such a program? If so… Why? ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/32 "2025-12-12T21:42:44Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Not interested in why campaigns like that wouldn’t work or why the best defence is a good offence, just some comparative albeit speculative numbers on the actual cost of developing national programs of peace seeking, passive resistance, and civil disobedience. If you teach everyone passive resistance, the training required is extremely minimal. You could make it a part of everyone’s high school requirements, so the costs for the instructors would already be included in teacher’s salaries (no additional cost there). You’d probably want to have textbooks, so figure $50 per textbook and roughly 4 million students. That works out to $200 million, or basically less than the costs of three F-35 fighter jets. There’s no real skill required to do nothing, so there’s no real training cost either. If the OP has something more in mind than simple civil disobedience, they’ll have to explain exactly what it is they want to “buy”. From there we can figure out the costs. But based on the minimal information in the OP, I think $200 million is a good ballpark to start with. The textbooks would probably have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years. It’s a significant savings over the $900 billion that we currently save on defense. It would also be completely ineffective, but as stated in the OP, that’s outside of the scope of this thread. But it would be a relatively cheap program to implement. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/33 "2025-12-12T21:50:26Z")
I would loosely estimate the costs at “everything” ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2025, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/34 "2025-12-12T23:39:53Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Is the question you want to ask “ **Why** do we teach people to fight wars and not to practice civil disobedience”? Because that’s what you seem to be getting at here. If so, you’d get better answers if you just asked that outright. I don’t know if that’s his question but I’ll take a shot at it. There might be a concern by the government that if civil disobedience is an effective means of fighting an occupying power and if it is widely taught to people, then people might choose to use civil disobedience against the American government rather than saving it for after an invasion. There isn’t an equivalent concern regarding the use of military force because military force tends to stay under the control of the government, at least in the history of this country. So the government may have decided that defending our country via military force is “safer” than doing so via civil disobedience. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/35 "2025-12-13T00:52:20Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > There might be a concern by the government that if civil disobedience is an effective means of fighting an occupying power and if it is widely taught to people, then people might choose to use civil disobedience against the American government rather than saving it for after an invasion. One could argue that historically speaking, civil disobedience has _only_ been effective against domestic oppressors. (Yes, even in India - the UK never ruled the country by force of arms, but rather did so by co-opting the local power structure. There was never a point in history when there were more British soldiers and cops in India than there were Indian ones. Not even close). ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/36 "2025-12-13T03:32:57Z")
I would disagree. Yes, the Indian people in the administration of the Raj outnumbered the British people. But ultimately all authority was held by the British. I feel the nationality of who’s giving the orders matters more than the nationality of who’s carrying them out. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/37 "2025-12-13T07:16:32Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > But ultimately all authority was held by the British. I feel the nationality of who’s giving the orders matters more than the nationality of who’s carrying them out. Authority was held by the British because the Indians allowed it. If the British had cracked down harder on the protestors, they might have faced protests from their own civil administration, and worse, rebellion from the Indian armed forces - and the Empire in 1947 was in no state to handle another Sepoy Mutiny. That’s the thing about civil disobedience: when it works, it’s often because of the implicit threat of violence if it doesn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 7:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/38 "2025-12-13T07:46:14Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Authority was held by the British because the Indians allowed it. That’s pretty much a universal truth about every government in history. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/39 "2025-12-13T07:49:31Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > That’s the thing about civil disobedience: when it works, it’s often because of the implicit threat of violence if it doesn’t. The counter-example here is the American civil rights movement. Black people were substantially outnumbered by white people so black people couldn’t make a credible threat to resort to violent conflict. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2025, 10:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616/40 "2025-12-13T10:06:18Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > That’s pretty much a universal truth about every government in history. Which was my point - India was an oppressive government, not a foreign invader. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/building-the-industrial-peace-complex/1025616.md?page=3)