Or, on the opposite side, “I don’t know what a robot is or what it does, so it must be stupid.”
Stranger is making very compelling, insightful, and informed posts, if you wanted to learn something about the subject.
I’m not certain of the genesis of that comment, but if I guessing your intent correctly it seems to be along the lines of that the United States spends too much on its military establishment and thus engages in needless and disruptive military adventurism for its own ends, and those ends often being those of special interests that do not reflect the overall betterment of the United States. All of this may well be true, and have been argued cogently by many observers. Former Democratic Presidential candidate Gary Hart (of Donna Rice/“Monkey Business” fame) has written a number of books advocating eliminating the professional United States Army and returning to the paradigm of a small skeleton Regular Army (United States) that existed prior to WWII with a volunteer/conscription Army of the United States in time of great need. His essential argument is that having a large standing Army requires regular entry into conflict in order to justify its own existence, which results in a cycle of aggression. It is a good point (although whether it is practical at a point where many MOS require thousands of hours of training to become proficient in operating equipment used on the modern battlefield is debatable) but not the one addressed in this thread, which is why the United States does or does not need the Marine Corps for the type of operations and objectives it seeks.
As for much of military technology being “really cool”, this is certainly the case, but not a legitimate criticism. I have had the personal opportunity to handle and operate many prototype or pilot production devices intended for military use that have later made their way into the commercial marketplace, including the now ubiquitous GPS units, cellular communications, satellite telephony, aramid (Kevlar) fiber, blood plasma substitute, LED illumination devices, et cetera. In fact, much of the modern technologies that we take for granted today, including current mass produced IC microprocessors are directly descended from military technology and would not have been developed for commercial applications on their own as the R&D development threshold was just too costly for the perceived benefits, many of which were unknown until the technology was already developed.
In fact, nearly any technology whatsoever, all the way back to the wheel and axle, can be tied back to military necessity and conquest as the first impetus. Books? Many of the earliest scrolls and books document military innovations for wide distributions. Saddled horses? Necessary to allow mounted infantry. Surgery? Needed and often developed to treat traumas experienced on the battlefield. Blue ocean navigation? Aircraft? Computers? Space launch vehicles? All invented or significantly developed to support military capability.
America and the world may not need military adventurism, but it (and the rest of the world) would be far poorer if military research and development were uncategorically axed.
Stranger
You are reading too much into my comment. There is no deeper meaning regarding military spending. I think it’s just a meme that didn’t translate well.
Mostly, it seems to me that if God came down and told us “Hey guys, you can’t have the Marines” we would figure out some way to function without them. The convoluted justifications for why the current setup of the Marines is the only possible way that the US military could continue functioning resembles another situation- the one where people find endless reasons why walking robots are the way of the future, despite the pretty compelling to the contrary. These people will always argue for the walking robots, because fundamentally walking robots are really cool and fit the vision of the future we grew up with. Likewise the Marines are pretty cool and fit the image of the military we grew up with, and we can get pretty heated about defending things we think are neat- especially “manly” things we think are nifty (look at any space program debate.)
It’s not a perfect analogy because walking robots are objectively worse than wheeled robots, whereas the Marines in their current form function just fine. It’s a comment on the perspective of the arguers, not the argument itself.
Have you actually read the arguments in this thread? Because the last page or more of this debate has focused on roles, missions, training, equipment, logistics, and other practical factors, not unsupported adherence to Platonic ideals of what a military should look like.
Those few who basically articulated Marine Corps fanboy messages early on have been pretty much dismissed from the discussion.
Perhaps you could illuminate this “pretty compelling [evidence] to the contrary” which shows that the Marine Corps is obsolete.
I agree that you could dispense with the Marine Corps and replace it with “something else”, but in order to fulfill the roles and capability of the Marines would require something that would very much resemble the Corps in different uniforms. Furthermore, the other services as currently composed do not have the logistical and unified fighting capability that is built into the Green Machine, and in order for another service to develop this would require crossing existing service boundaries and all the political conflict that would entail.
It is also worthwhile to note that while the Department of the Army is a military organization and the US Army is a service that performs front line combat operations, it has many other primary roles besides combat operations (or “warfighting” in the current parlance) including supervising and maintaining large civil engineering projects, providing logistical and security support for foreign aid programs, intelligence analysis, research, et cetera. The same applies to the other services. In contrast, the Marine Corps is a dedicated warfighting service for which other roles are ancillary.
Stranger