Well, let’s be clear. Congress isn’t funding the military budget because there is an interest from the people they represent–it’s lobbied interest.
So you basically agree with the post of mine that you’ve quoted–that the problem is a corrupt and depraved but mutable set of social values, that can totally be changed.
When you say “there’s no rational reason why governments and countries couldn’t or shouldn’t fund pure research & proofs of concept regardless of military purposes,” you are, with all due respect, missing the point. In fact, to nations–for whom their primary interest is in military and political advantage, not, repeat, not advancing technology for the future of mankind or providing humanitarian assistance to those in desperate need–it makes perfect sense. Of course, a nation such as the United States, the former Soviet Union, or China will spend extravegantly on research that offers to provide even a marginal advantage over other competitors regardless of any practical return. The untold hundreds of billions of dollars the Soviet Union spent on ballistic missiles and space weapons, including the Buran shuttle which offered the same essentially useless capability to the Soviets that the STS offered to us–bankrupted the nation to the point it could no longer sustain itself; and yet, it was justified in the minds of (mostly) rational men for decades. The absurd budget for stealth technology on the B-2 bomber program–which offered no capability not already achieved by the ICBM and fleet ballistic missile programs save for supposedly undetectable first strike that the United States ostensibly disavowed–resulted in aircraft of breathtaking procurement and operating cost and stunningly little practical capability, the cost of a single article of which could have eradicated a disease or provided wide scale infrastructure improvement.
The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) that I previously mentioned is an exact study of the attempt to apply this kind of rationale to non-militar yprojects; delayed for years over arguments about whose state it would be in, finally placed in Texas to appease the largest power block, and then cancelled five years later after that block fell out of favor and nearly half of the original budget had been sunk into construction and research costs, resulting in not only reducing the American stature in high energy physics but eliminating the opportunity to bring tens of billions of research dollars in the US economy and leaving an entire generation of particle physicists scrambling for any kind of jobs. (Note that this probably fed into the Wall Street boom and the overuse of analytical models as physicists without portfolio streamed into financial accounting offices under the assumption that the statistical predictive models of basic particle mechanics could also apply to economic events.)
Other examples of proposed projects on the scale of military programs but have failed to gain traction are on-orbit asteroid monitoring and protection (feasible with only modest advances in available technology at a cost of ~US$20B to ~US$50B, which could avert a single event with a fiscal impact of ten or a hundred times that cost); a space-based in-situ resource utilization infrastructure, the development of wide-scale alternative transportation fuel sources; upgrading the electrical transmission infrastructure to a system robust enough to survive the Carrington-scale coronal mass ejection event which is statistically likely to occur sometime in the next three decades and may leave the continental United States with insufficient capacity for years afterward; agricultural and irrigation system reforms which will halt depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer upon which the American “Breadbasket”; not to mention the treatment and cure of numerous diseases and conditions which a concerted research effort could offer.
But none of these are pressing security problems for the nation or immediate social/political issues for the populace at large, so it is impossible to get enough traction to have them heard and adopted by the voting public. And so we continue to build a “missile shield” which is more porous than mosquito netting, an advanced bomber program designed to deal with threats from the last century, and space warfare programs so we can spread so much debris in orbit that it will be of use to no one. Unfortunately, this is where the money flows to, and from this is where the fundamental high cost threshold breakthroughs largely come. Regardless of whether you consider this to be right or fair (I don’t) it is the actual reality that we live in, not the “reality” concocted in the minds of people who only want to talk in hypothetical terms of what could be done with some kind of perfect foreknowledge and omniscient wisdom that is not a common characteristic of humanity as a whole.
Absolutely. Not only is it better for everyone else, i.e. we don’t have to invade your country to ensure the flow of sapphire-encrusted applied phlebotinum to ensure that our machination factories keep up to full speed, but we also don’t have to send our own young men and women to die to “uphold freedom and liberty” or whatever the excuse is today to justify hanging up the “Mission Accomplished!” banner. Once we are self-sufficient–whether that is by innovating our way out of need for external resources or finding those resources elsewhere within our borders or in space–we can pick and choose what conflicts we feel a genuine ethical need to engage in for humanitarian reasons instead of economic need or political advantage. It is foolish to think that human conflict will end anytime soon even with essentially unlimited access to resources, but without the excuse or motivation to go to war over oil, uranium, water, or whatever, it becomes a lot more difficult for politicians to rationalize the need to go to war or even maintain an enormous standing army which makes it so easy to engage in conflict without thinking through the consequences.
And lets be clear; while those lobbyists have inarguably undue influence on politicians, they’re selling that influence on their ability to bring in votes and sway critical electoral blocks. Ultimately, regardless of campaign finance fiddling, “The People” are responsible for how tax revenue is spend and what the nation as a whole does with its fiscal, political, and military power. And many of those same people are invested heavily–both financially and emotionally–in the “military industrial complex” and the supposed prestige it offers America regardless of the consequences.
Stranger
No, I struggle to find anything you’ve written that I agree with.
That’s odd, because your entire post not only does not contradict anything I’ve said, but in fact supports it.
This is true only in the context of a depraved but mutable set of social values.
Which is the same mistake you keep repeating over and over again–your ludicrous assumption that these social values are somehow fixed.
Your characterization of defense spending as being “depraved” is not supported by anything I said, and my entire post was implicitly about the facile “mutable values” assertion. I can’t help you if you didn’t follow the entire damned point of my post.
Stranger on a Train, I’ve been a lurker here for years, but I wanted to chime in. Your posts in this thread have been as insightful, interesting and informational as always, and you have my thanks.
Steely Dan, on the other hand, has offered nothing of value to this thread, aside from heckling Stranger into further discussion.
I don’t think so. In a democracy, yes, but not in a Republic. We are responsible for deciding who gets elected, to the extent that tweedle-dum or tweedle-de gets the vote. It’s not like we are really that aware or elect people that represent our needs or interests.
I don’t know enough about lobbying to determine the extent to which lobbyists actually get blocks of votes or simply provide promises of campaign financing. Honestly, I haven’t seen any efforts by lobbyists to get votes for increasing or preserving the military budget.
The United States is both a democracy and a republic. Those concepts are not mutually exclusive.
I don’t want to get away from the point of the thread here but by democracy I’m thinking of government decision by referendum, rather than Jerry Brown, say, deciding whether gay marriage is legal, for example.
Could you define “broken-window pseudo-thinking” for me please?
Haven’t we covered this already?
Well, he never answered my question. Kobal2 did, but I’m curious to see what Steely Dan Fan means when he uses it, rather than make assumptions.
The military budget. Let me bring up a few shining examples. The Bradley fighting vehicle. The hundreds of missle silos that were obsolete before they were completed. The billions spent on ammunition, bombs, and ordnance in general that went to a few corporations, the same corporations that pay our elected officials to keep wars going and to start new ones. The black budget. The fact that the Pentagon has not been audited for 15 years. The hundreds of military bases in resort areas. The Pentagons practice of militarizing our police forces with military equipment. I could go on. And on. For days. But last the Hellfire missles we are using to slaughter women and children and babies in order to kill a wanted man. I believe there are enough veterans and armed citizens in this country, we dont need a standing army.
I want to add one more thing. In the 1960s my father was a military officer stationed at White Sands Missle Range. (WSMR) Many times he would come home from work in a foul mood. I asked him one day why. He said all the civilian employees, the engineers, scientists, etc. did nothing but play cards all day while he had to work. Once in a while they would fire a missle but for the most part these people spent their careers playing cards and now are retired collecting retirement money for same. Playing cards. We could have a viable military for one tenth of what we spend now.
Which bases are these? I need to update my dream sheet.
If there’s one good argument to cutting the defense budget to a fraction of what it is now, it has got to be an anecdote about civilians playing too much poker on a military base fifty years ago.
Touche!
Unfortunately, wars don’t tend to give advanced notice.
If Randy Quaid can save us from an alien armada, I bet our veterans and gun owners can handle an invasion my a well-equipped professional army.