17 ms·
Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of military research could be something useful, but that money would go a lot further if we just went fo
by danny_codes 4y ago
Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of military research could be something useful, but that money would go a lot further if we just went for the useful thing immediately. The F35 is a good example. Whatever technology gains came out of that project are likely useful in general, but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.
- felipemnoa 4y ago>>but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon. True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting fighter jet.
- ISL 4y agoI don't know if you've ever met any ... aircraft metallurgists, for example, but holy poops are they motivated by doing anything awesome with advanced alloys.
- felipemnoa 4y agoYeah, but you need to motivate the people that will be footing the bill and also the ones that approve the budget. The tax payers, the legislators... The regular person will not care about technical stuff like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting yet.
- WalterBright 4y agoI'm an engineer, and I'm motivated by the end product, not the just inventing a machine.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoIndeed. Some people defend war spending by saying that it leads to, say, medial advances. Seems to me that you can fund medical research without spending a trillion dollars sending humans around the planet, causing another trillion in infrastructure damage, air-conditioning tents in a desert, blowing limbs off the aforementioned humans, flying them home and then still spending the money on the research to fix them (and in the US especially, then also denying these hard-won fruits of this whole taxpayer-funded endeavour to the taxpayers).
- ghiculescu 4y agoThe point of military spending is to prevent war by creating a strong deterrent that encourages diplomacy. It’s not to start wars, that’s why it’s called defense spending. (I’m not arguing the US always does this right.)
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThat doesn't work when you have a belligerent who needs to get itself into conflicts every 15 years to keep its experience levels up and foment conflict abroad in the "off season" to support its MIC.
- hanselot 4y ago
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoThe continental united states is surrounded by two friendly neighbors that are not a threat to us. We are separated from our nearest peer adversaries by thousands of miles of ocean, and their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us. We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
- sharkweek 4y agoIf that happened, we'd invade ourselves to prevent such a country from developing.
- ckw 4y ago
- throwaway6734 4y agoSo give away the strength of the dollar and the ease of international trade?
- _6zqn 4y agoBut we also got the most advanced strike fighter in the world out of it.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoIt’s not popular to talk positively about the F35 yet. You need to pretend that the US’s military spending is entirely negative and the world would be better off if it had zero standing army.
- ge96 4y agoThe tech is great though, sharing data between the fighters. Countries lining up to buy it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agohttps://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/07/20/czech-republic-selects-f-35-as-next-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/07/20/czech-r... Looks like useful output to me.
- nickff 4y agoHow useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting? I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
- wizofaus 4y agoWas landing on the moon "useful"?
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoAll that matters is we did it before the USSR.
- wizofaus 4y agoSurely the one thing that would have made the moon landing better is if it had been a truly cooperative international effort.
- nickff 4y agoIt would have taken much longer to come about, if it had happened at all. International efforts are like cartels which agree that they'll share any innovations, thus stunting progress (by removing the incentive to improve).
- wizofaus 4y agoUndoubtedly. But I'm glad my own country got to at least play a small part, which of course we had to make a movie about (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish).
- dmix 4y agoThen why did they do it 6 times?
- 4y ago
- calvinmorrison 4y agoMaybe I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of the F-35 was to keep the engineering firms sort of perpetually in a war-ready state and keep the engineer pipeline going strong.
- MR4D 4y agoThat the Internet exists directly refutes what looks like common reasoning. It never would have happened without DARPA (because telecoms never would have let it happen).
- margalabargala 4y agoThat's a fair point; there's something to be said for novel technology being developed by industries/organizations adjacent to but not directly involved in the industry of that technology. This seems to tend to yield better results than funding the industry directly. My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries. For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network. Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
- MR4D 4y agoYou make a great point about "adjacent" players. However, in the case of the military, it's even moreso. . . Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it. The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes. The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war! Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military. [0] - https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-uranium https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-u...
- throwaway894345 4y agoI think it’s just lack of imagination—no one in the 80s could see what the Internet could become—it would have been a huge gamble with little predictable value (of course, we have the benefit of hindsight).
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThe internet being a byproduct of defense spending means that the ROI of defense spending is probably many years ahead considering where it put the U.S. from a global software dominance standpoint.
- r3012 4y agoIf only the world was so simple. I think the connection is more direct than you might suspect. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-tyson-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-ty... And https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-war https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-wa... Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang
- tomnipotent 4y ago> but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon. Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
- throwaway894345 4y agoAgreed. There’s no way the government in the 80s would have invested in the Internet without a defense pretext, for example, because no one understood the potential it would unlock. Similarly, there would be virtually no space exploration or satellites (or any of the other significant advancements) apart from the space race.