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You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a ver

You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. You never hear the veterans talk about that - it's always about the success metrics that they define for themselves (eg: casualty ratio - "we lost only 2 lives on our end, and they lost XXXXX"). Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer, and contrast that to Google's net impact on our society. First of all, it's not a cost center but a massive revenue center, and it paid for endless road constructions and similar projects across California, New York, and all other states that Google operates in. And while we can argue about the political bias in their search results, I believe Google has made information more accessible, and that's fundamentally a good thing. I imagine it has to do with how these two organizations approach their communities from the very beginning: - Google: don't be evil - Military: we have our own law where your jury can consist of as few as just 3 officers, and only 2 of them need to agree to send you to jail. Oh, and you don't get a lawyer until the investigation is finished, including your own deposition. So... still want to download all those incriminating documents and expose someone in the military? Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. So they are fundamentally not opposed to how the military works to begin with, and it's therefore not surprising that they are largely happy with their internal success metrics.

lupire 5y ago
People complaing about the military too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_States_military https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United... Everyone who works anywhere is not "fundamentally opposed to how it works".
Jansen312 5y ago
As long as their internal success metrics align with civilian interest, I am ok with that. But some can't integrate back especially when jobs require creativity, extensive domain knowledge and experience, and multi-tasking with multi-roles. It is that later that most veterans can't function well. In their previous life, things are predefined and roles are limited to just 1 or 2. Civilians have to juggle a lot and has no clear cut directions how things work out. Employers also won't tolerate your disabilities if that can be taken over by any other normal persons.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > But some can't integrate back ... It's more than a few; it's a widespread problem. It's always a challenge for people from the military to not only adjust to civilian life, but to build up the networks of contacts, etc. that deliver us jobs and many other resources.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    As a practical matter, what I've seen in SV companies, is that there are networks from folks that new each other in the service. Once one gets a role in a company, many other skilled veterans are sure to follow. The same thing happens to group from other prior companies that get hired in a waves, often following a particular senior leader brought in for a new initiative, or a new startup. I guess this doesn't scale to veterans as a whole, but it does show how even a little support can go a long way.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      This applies to many excluded groups. People hire from networks; if you don't make any effort, your network will be the status quo, which last from generation to generation. With a little effort, you can expand your network to excluded groups. From even a purely self-interested perspective, access to more talent and a more diverse set of ideas and experiences is never a bad thing, and being exluded means there is more undiscovered talent. One simple method is to tell the recruiter that you want at least N serious candidates from excluded groups for each job. This causes the recruiter to also expand their network.
toast0 5y ago
> From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. For the most part, all of those issues fall squarely upon the leadership. Military personell have a duty to fufil lawful orders, and you can't simply resign and take a different job if given a lawful order you don't think is a good thing for all of those reasons. In contrast, when working for an employer, you have at least some ability to refuse to do things you don't think are a good idea. Worst case, you're fired or resign and need to find other work. But you're very unlikely to be court martialed and imprisoned. Or even sued.
ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago
> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions. I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  Also, Google is no longer "not evil".
- gumby 5y ago
  > I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years… Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life. Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns. Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.” There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Its probably just bias from only just hearing the success stories and because it was still pretty early in the time of computing, but reading about the stories/companies/projects/etc. from 70s/80s SV fills me with awe and regret that I came too late to be a part of it, whereas nowadays it’s just seems “meh”.
    - selestify 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
> Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. Are you talking about the US military and do you have some data on that? I see people with no experience of the military imagine a storybook entity (which is a very popular public concept these days), but the US military has significant retention problems, very high rates of suicide and sexual assault (signals of and, for the latter, a cause of a toxic environment), and a lot of morale, discipline, and corruption problems. As a couple of examples of the latter, around a year ago, the head of special operations said that it was their top priority. In ~ the last year, the Navy was having trouble filling higher ranks because so many officers had been kicked out due to corruption scandals (e.g., the 'Fat Leonard' scandal). The glorification of the military might seem patriotic, but I think it's the opposite: It's a way of not seeing and addressing problems, which weakens defense and leaves the people serving to deal with the problems and suffer the consequences (including the environment, more and longer tours, and possibly their lives). It's like a case of extreme over-confidence in a CEO - a very dangerous flaw. > Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer People in the military don't gripe?
- Retric 5y ago
  Yes, you can find some seriously messed up stuff in the military. I was looking at some criminal data and seeing a huge number of attempted murder charges related to one case I thought the data might have been in error. But no, throwing a live grenade into a tent is quite serious. That said, it’s easy to underestimate just how large the US military is and how many people cycle in and out every year. Just unemployment benefits alone get quite expensive during any economic downturn. Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people." So you think they had specifically selected bunch of unstable to work in Abu Ghraib?
GhettoComputers 5y ago
>Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. This sounds very biased. The VA is constantly complained about as is their benefits payments. The MRAs suck, they can’t speak about some secret stuff, none of this information is unusual or buried, it sounds like you have a very biased viewpoint, maybe from not getting to know any military. >From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. Vietnam, the fuck up in Iraq, and suicides are well known to be bad to everyone including the military, the default response to anyone who served is “thank you for your service”. Many see it as a job. I know a very friendly female marine (they complained about her kindness and said it wasn’t militant -and reflected badly on their perceptions), she was well decorated, and complained about sexism even though she was a superior to these men. Get to know some military people, your biased opinion will change.
hogFeast 5y ago
> You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. Same in every bureaucracy.
refurb 5y ago
This is a bizarre take. The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. And the militaries goals are well, war-focused? It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aerosmile 5y ago
  > The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. I would agree with this statement when it comes to defensive campaigns. But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc. It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security. But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet. > And the militaries goals are well, war-focused? They are, apparently, in the US. I learned that when the CEO of Flexport suggested that we use the military to temporarily unblock the supply chain crisis by leveraging our military's logistics capabilities, which resulted in at least one person leaving a dismissive comment here on HN. I realize that this might have been an isolated view, but I doubt it. In other countries, it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not. It's a resource we pay for, so why not share the excess capacity if it's not detrimental to our defensive readiness? I would argue that saving a few million jobs in the US is worth not being able to fulfill the two-war doctrine for a few months. > It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month. This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia. Who can do it for less money? Perhaps the US is still ahead, but I genuinely don't know. Does money matter when it comes to readiness? Well, when it comes to defense, probably not. But if we're talking about invading a foreign country, I think the economics very much start to be a part of the overall equation. A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really. For the record, I am not anti-military at all. I just want to point at behaviors that seem a bit out of touch, and which if rectified would position us to have all the military capabilities we need at the least necessary cost.
ok_dad 5y ago
There are upsides and downsides to everything. I did say "don't get me started" on that topic, because while I have lots of good things to say about the personnel in the military, you'll note I didn't say anything about the military in general.
chii 5y ago
> costs of most of the military engagements that's not on the personnel inside the military to decide what war to wage, but on the politicians and civilians. The military is a tool - how well the tool works is a good metric to have. Whether the tool is used for good or evil, or whatever purpose the owner of the tool deems, is not on the tool itself to measure.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  See my related response to refurb's comment.
fredophile 5y ago
You're conflating the military with their civilian leadership. Civilians decide what the military is going to do; the military gets the job done. If you have a problem with the direction and costs of the military, blame the civilians in charge.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  See my related response to refurb's comment.
- rvba 5y ago
  Yea, military is never to blame, pristine people with IQ of 150 /s
morpheuskafka 5y ago
> Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. I think there are probably a fair number of everyday people who enlist without thinking about such things as what they would do if they needed to expose a war crime to the media or how their due process protections would compare to civilian life. Now, they would probably know and be okay with getting treated like dirt in boot camp, having restrictions about where to live, where they can go in their free time, etc. But probably not as much about the more philosophical institutional beliefs about authority, ethics, what to optimize for, etc.
Msw242 5y ago
If you were going to complain about wasteful spending and failing projects in the DoD, I would respect your reasoning more. Instead, when it got to "humanitarian this, environmental that" you turned into Charlie Brown's teacher.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  I don't know why anything "humanitarian" should be taken with a grain of salt. You surely are not going to argue that something like the Syrian humanitarian crisis is comparable with a cartoon character? On the environmental side, I am not surprised to see people raising eyebrows, because the US military's impact there is vastly underreported. A lot of effort went into exempting the US military from the Kyoto Protocol - and that's for a good reason, since the US military alone emits more CO2 than many industrialized nations. So if you don't believe in global warming, there's nothing I can do to reason with you. But if you do, you might realize that the environmental impact alone might be more damaging than some of the other items I mentioned. Think of it this way - if the US military cleaned up its act, we could remove the emission control devices from all US cars and still come out on top.
asdff 5y ago
Most military people I've met were from all over the political spectrum. A lot of people I knew just joined to get free tuition in college. They don't have fun when they have to do their regular drill and work is generally stressful and not exciting. They have drug test timing down to a science. That's the sort of environment that apparently breeds real camaraderie, at least.
derekjdanserl 5y ago
The only construction project Google ever did in my city was use ancient (loud as hell) equipment to rip these big grooves down mile after mile of perfectly good neighborhood streets in all of our poor communities to cheaply install their “fiber internet” experiment that they abandoned 1 year later. And our streets are still covered with the rubber crap they filled the grooves with. More of it comes up every time it rains. It gets all over our pets and everything. I hate Google so much.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Surely, someone did at some point do some work on the roads in your neighborhood outside of the example you're bringing up? Well, that's taxpayer money, and Google is a big taxpayer.
tinyhouse 5y ago
The current Googlers complain when the morning shake is not warm enough to their liking. Not to mention too many Googlers (and other tech companies employees, esp in the US) forget that they are getting paid to build products and no one cares about their political ideology.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Phiwise_ 5y ago
>it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. There's a pile and a half of people who only join the military for a much higher payout of benefits for essentially unskilled work, or only so the military will pay to educate them into skilled work certification, or only because they made some mistakes and it's that or a felony charge (typically with jail time), and they're all typically just hoping to fly under the radar of such things until they get out with what they want going in rather than genuinely approving of the military doing to them the sorts of things the military does. Obviously not all, but many of these also come out with majorly reoriented priorities. We can pass value judgements on the goodness of the imposed priorities all we want, but they're pretty irrelevant to and just distract from the phenomenon itself: "Indoctrination" is absolutely the correct word to use, so much we need very little, if any, additional description. The US military, and pretty much every military under the sun, uses an intense bout of classical stress conditioning to induce the sort of immediate, unquestioning dedication you've needed for hundreds of years in an effective infantry formation to teach boot camp recruits how to be in the mindset of just efficiently and stoicly doing their job as the brass designed you, the very small cog in the very large machine of a superpower-scale techno-mechanized combined arms war machine, to do it. In software, experimentation is king everywhere with a healthy outlook, because wastes of time give just finite losses of money while breakout successes are comparatively infinite in money gains, so most risks are worth it until they're clearly working or not working. In the military, when the rubber hits the road, other people are depending on you to do your job just as everyone expects it to go so they can integrate you into their job, which includes shooting and getting shot at somewhere down the net. Flying by the seat of your pants in such an environment could possibly get your fellows killed when things don't pan out and you fail to deliver, so the simple stations the vast majority of military members fill just don't really tolerate independent thought without going up several ranks of approval. The type of risk just isn't seen as acceptable in that context regardless of why you're taking it, even if it's specifically for the military's long-term interest. The philosophy is that the juice is never worth the squeeze in combat, and since we're a combat force on the label we'll spread that philosophy of "just do what the man with the fancier patch says" to every desk worker and wrench turner as well as trigger puller. And we'll spread it through the most irresistible teaching method we're still allowed to. Sorry for that ramble, but it's really important to not deemphasize the absolute psychological impact classical conditioning in such an overwhelming social context can have. There's a reason they march you for miles at first when they almost don't care how fat you get once you've got an actual job. There's a reason Marine boot camp intentionally prevents you from sleeping just about whenever possible the first few days you show up while knowing resistance to sleep is impossible to train. There's a reason hazing underperformers is just about as old as history itself. It's because you can make anyone do anything if you just beat them enough, if you just stress them more than they've experienced before. Stress basically compels obedience, and obedience is very habit forming. Is there some selection bias like you describe in play today? Absolutely, but I don't think anyone familiar enough with the psychological phenomenon I'm not doing a great job describing would think much would change if it wasn't around. We've all read about Stockholm/Lima syndrome after all, where people with neutral or reverse sympathies fall just as easily, and it's essentially the same phenomenon. Enough stress turns everyone, even independent thinking people or bullheaded rebellious people, into receptive sponges.
lucian1900 5y ago
US veterans aren't universally indoctrinated like that, there are exceptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykWTaLsRbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykWTaLsRbw

lupire 5y ago

People complaing about the military too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_States_military https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United... Everyone who works anywhere is not "fundamentally opposed to how it works".

Jansen312 5y ago

As long as their internal success metrics align with civilian interest, I am ok with that. But some can't integrate back especially when jobs require creativity, extensive domain knowledge and experience, and multi-tasking with multi-roles. It is that later that most veterans can't function well. In their previous life, things are predefined and roles are limited to just 1 or 2. Civilians have to juggle a lot and has no clear cut directions how things work out. Employers also won't tolerate your disabilities if that can be taken over by any other normal persons.

wolverine876 5y ago
> But some can't integrate back ... It's more than a few; it's a widespread problem. It's always a challenge for people from the military to not only adjust to civilian life, but to build up the networks of contacts, etc. that deliver us jobs and many other resources.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  As a practical matter, what I've seen in SV companies, is that there are networks from folks that new each other in the service. Once one gets a role in a company, many other skilled veterans are sure to follow. The same thing happens to group from other prior companies that get hired in a waves, often following a particular senior leader brought in for a new initiative, or a new startup. I guess this doesn't scale to veterans as a whole, but it does show how even a little support can go a long way.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    This applies to many excluded groups. People hire from networks; if you don't make any effort, your network will be the status quo, which last from generation to generation. With a little effort, you can expand your network to excluded groups. From even a purely self-interested perspective, access to more talent and a more diverse set of ideas and experiences is never a bad thing, and being exluded means there is more undiscovered talent. One simple method is to tell the recruiter that you want at least N serious candidates from excluded groups for each job. This causes the recruiter to also expand their network.

toast0 5y ago

> From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. For the most part, all of those issues fall squarely upon the leadership. Military personell have a duty to fufil lawful orders, and you can't simply resign and take a different job if given a lawful order you don't think is a good thing for all of those reasons. In contrast, when working for an employer, you have at least some ability to refuse to do things you don't think are a good idea. Worst case, you're fired or resign and need to find other work. But you're very unlikely to be court martialed and imprisoned. Or even sued.

ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago

> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions. I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.

Viliam1234 5y ago
Also, Google is no longer "not evil".
gumby 5y ago
> I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years… Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life. Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns. Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.” There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Its probably just bias from only just hearing the success stories and because it was still pretty early in the time of computing, but reading about the stories/companies/projects/etc. from 70s/80s SV fills me with awe and regret that I came too late to be a part of it, whereas nowadays it’s just seems “meh”.
  - selestify 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

> Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. Are you talking about the US military and do you have some data on that? I see people with no experience of the military imagine a storybook entity (which is a very popular public concept these days), but the US military has significant retention problems, very high rates of suicide and sexual assault (signals of and, for the latter, a cause of a toxic environment), and a lot of morale, discipline, and corruption problems. As a couple of examples of the latter, around a year ago, the head of special operations said that it was their top priority. In ~ the last year, the Navy was having trouble filling higher ranks because so many officers had been kicked out due to corruption scandals (e.g., the 'Fat Leonard' scandal). The glorification of the military might seem patriotic, but I think it's the opposite: It's a way of not seeing and addressing problems, which weakens defense and leaves the people serving to deal with the problems and suffer the consequences (including the environment, more and longer tours, and possibly their lives). It's like a case of extreme over-confidence in a CEO - a very dangerous flaw. > Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer People in the military don't gripe?

Retric 5y ago
Yes, you can find some seriously messed up stuff in the military. I was looking at some criminal data and seeing a huge number of attempted murder charges related to one case I thought the data might have been in error. But no, throwing a live grenade into a tent is quite serious. That said, it’s easy to underestimate just how large the US military is and how many people cycle in and out every year. Just unemployment benefits alone get quite expensive during any economic downturn. Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people." So you think they had specifically selected bunch of unstable to work in Abu Ghraib?

GhettoComputers 5y ago

>Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. This sounds very biased. The VA is constantly complained about as is their benefits payments. The MRAs suck, they can’t speak about some secret stuff, none of this information is unusual or buried, it sounds like you have a very biased viewpoint, maybe from not getting to know any military. >From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. Vietnam, the fuck up in Iraq, and suicides are well known to be bad to everyone including the military, the default response to anyone who served is “thank you for your service”. Many see it as a job. I know a very friendly female marine (they complained about her kindness and said it wasn’t militant -and reflected badly on their perceptions), she was well decorated, and complained about sexism even though she was a superior to these men. Get to know some military people, your biased opinion will change.

hogFeast 5y ago

> You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. Same in every bureaucracy.

refurb 5y ago

This is a bizarre take. The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. And the militaries goals are well, war-focused? It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aerosmile 5y ago
> The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. I would agree with this statement when it comes to defensive campaigns. But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc. It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security. But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet. > And the militaries goals are well, war-focused? They are, apparently, in the US. I learned that when the CEO of Flexport suggested that we use the military to temporarily unblock the supply chain crisis by leveraging our military's logistics capabilities, which resulted in at least one person leaving a dismissive comment here on HN. I realize that this might have been an isolated view, but I doubt it. In other countries, it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not. It's a resource we pay for, so why not share the excess capacity if it's not detrimental to our defensive readiness? I would argue that saving a few million jobs in the US is worth not being able to fulfill the two-war doctrine for a few months. > It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month. This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia. Who can do it for less money? Perhaps the US is still ahead, but I genuinely don't know. Does money matter when it comes to readiness? Well, when it comes to defense, probably not. But if we're talking about invading a foreign country, I think the economics very much start to be a part of the overall equation. A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really. For the record, I am not anti-military at all. I just want to point at behaviors that seem a bit out of touch, and which if rectified would position us to have all the military capabilities we need at the least necessary cost.

ok_dad 5y ago

There are upsides and downsides to everything. I did say "don't get me started" on that topic, because while I have lots of good things to say about the personnel in the military, you'll note I didn't say anything about the military in general.

chii 5y ago

> costs of most of the military engagements that's not on the personnel inside the military to decide what war to wage, but on the politicians and civilians. The military is a tool - how well the tool works is a good metric to have. Whether the tool is used for good or evil, or whatever purpose the owner of the tool deems, is not on the tool itself to measure.

aerosmile 5y ago
See my related response to refurb's comment.

fredophile 5y ago

You're conflating the military with their civilian leadership. Civilians decide what the military is going to do; the military gets the job done. If you have a problem with the direction and costs of the military, blame the civilians in charge.

aerosmile 5y ago
See my related response to refurb's comment.
rvba 5y ago
Yea, military is never to blame, pristine people with IQ of 150 /s

morpheuskafka 5y ago

> Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. I think there are probably a fair number of everyday people who enlist without thinking about such things as what they would do if they needed to expose a war crime to the media or how their due process protections would compare to civilian life. Now, they would probably know and be okay with getting treated like dirt in boot camp, having restrictions about where to live, where they can go in their free time, etc. But probably not as much about the more philosophical institutional beliefs about authority, ethics, what to optimize for, etc.

Msw242 5y ago

If you were going to complain about wasteful spending and failing projects in the DoD, I would respect your reasoning more. Instead, when it got to "humanitarian this, environmental that" you turned into Charlie Brown's teacher.

aerosmile 5y ago
I don't know why anything "humanitarian" should be taken with a grain of salt. You surely are not going to argue that something like the Syrian humanitarian crisis is comparable with a cartoon character? On the environmental side, I am not surprised to see people raising eyebrows, because the US military's impact there is vastly underreported. A lot of effort went into exempting the US military from the Kyoto Protocol - and that's for a good reason, since the US military alone emits more CO2 than many industrialized nations. So if you don't believe in global warming, there's nothing I can do to reason with you. But if you do, you might realize that the environmental impact alone might be more damaging than some of the other items I mentioned. Think of it this way - if the US military cleaned up its act, we could remove the emission control devices from all US cars and still come out on top.

asdff 5y ago

Most military people I've met were from all over the political spectrum. A lot of people I knew just joined to get free tuition in college. They don't have fun when they have to do their regular drill and work is generally stressful and not exciting. They have drug test timing down to a science. That's the sort of environment that apparently breeds real camaraderie, at least.

derekjdanserl 5y ago

The only construction project Google ever did in my city was use ancient (loud as hell) equipment to rip these big grooves down mile after mile of perfectly good neighborhood streets in all of our poor communities to cheaply install their “fiber internet” experiment that they abandoned 1 year later. And our streets are still covered with the rubber crap they filled the grooves with. More of it comes up every time it rains. It gets all over our pets and everything. I hate Google so much.

aerosmile 5y ago
Surely, someone did at some point do some work on the roads in your neighborhood outside of the example you're bringing up? Well, that's taxpayer money, and Google is a big taxpayer.

tinyhouse 5y ago

The current Googlers complain when the morning shake is not warm enough to their liking. Not to mention too many Googlers (and other tech companies employees, esp in the US) forget that they are getting paid to build products and no one cares about their political ideology.

deleted 5y ago

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Phiwise_ 5y ago

>it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. There's a pile and a half of people who only join the military for a much higher payout of benefits for essentially unskilled work, or only so the military will pay to educate them into skilled work certification, or only because they made some mistakes and it's that or a felony charge (typically with jail time), and they're all typically just hoping to fly under the radar of such things until they get out with what they want going in rather than genuinely approving of the military doing to them the sorts of things the military does. Obviously not all, but many of these also come out with majorly reoriented priorities. We can pass value judgements on the goodness of the imposed priorities all we want, but they're pretty irrelevant to and just distract from the phenomenon itself: "Indoctrination" is absolutely the correct word to use, so much we need very little, if any, additional description. The US military, and pretty much every military under the sun, uses an intense bout of classical stress conditioning to induce the sort of immediate, unquestioning dedication you've needed for hundreds of years in an effective infantry formation to teach boot camp recruits how to be in the mindset of just efficiently and stoicly doing their job as the brass designed you, the very small cog in the very large machine of a superpower-scale techno-mechanized combined arms war machine, to do it. In software, experimentation is king everywhere with a healthy outlook, because wastes of time give just finite losses of money while breakout successes are comparatively infinite in money gains, so most risks are worth it until they're clearly working or not working. In the military, when the rubber hits the road, other people are depending on you to do your job just as everyone expects it to go so they can integrate you into their job, which includes shooting and getting shot at somewhere down the net. Flying by the seat of your pants in such an environment could possibly get your fellows killed when things don't pan out and you fail to deliver, so the simple stations the vast majority of military members fill just don't really tolerate independent thought without going up several ranks of approval. The type of risk just isn't seen as acceptable in that context regardless of why you're taking it, even if it's specifically for the military's long-term interest. The philosophy is that the juice is never worth the squeeze in combat, and since we're a combat force on the label we'll spread that philosophy of "just do what the man with the fancier patch says" to every desk worker and wrench turner as well as trigger puller. And we'll spread it through the most irresistible teaching method we're still allowed to. Sorry for that ramble, but it's really important to not deemphasize the absolute psychological impact classical conditioning in such an overwhelming social context can have. There's a reason they march you for miles at first when they almost don't care how fat you get once you've got an actual job. There's a reason Marine boot camp intentionally prevents you from sleeping just about whenever possible the first few days you show up while knowing resistance to sleep is impossible to train. There's a reason hazing underperformers is just about as old as history itself. It's because you can make anyone do anything if you just beat them enough, if you just stress them more than they've experienced before. Stress basically compels obedience, and obedience is very habit forming. Is there some selection bias like you describe in play today? Absolutely, but I don't think anyone familiar enough with the psychological phenomenon I'm not doing a great job describing would think much would change if it wasn't around. We've all read about Stockholm/Lima syndrome after all, where people with neutral or reverse sympathies fall just as easily, and it's essentially the same phenomenon. Enough stress turns everyone, even independent thinking people or bullheaded rebellious people, into receptive sponges.

lucian1900 5y ago

US veterans aren't universally indoctrinated like that, there are exceptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykWTaLsRbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykWTaLsRbw