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I'm sure everyone has their own reason, so I'll just speak for myself. I don't understand why we spend so much time and resource getting better at war when we

• reducesuffering 4y ago
  There is a very real risk coming up in a few years of China attempting to invade Taiwan. 250,000 people in Ukraine and Russia are killed or wounded because Russia was not deterred to invade. The difference in distance makes it difficult to project power in defense of Taiwan, without programs like these. China is making more progress than the US on closing the military differential.
• samuria 4y ago
  > the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal The US's history with war is far from any of those reasons. Ethics is one of the least of politicians concern. The main reason why the US hasn't invaded a big country yet is because the world is divided in 2, and invasion would mean the end of the world. Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen (recent ones) would beg to differ on the US's very ethical wars.
• mc32 4y ago
  Because things don't stand still. If you don't continually try to improve, one, well, could end up in Russia's shoes. A has-been who is more bluff than bite. Of course they do have one tremendous bite up their sleeve --which of course no one in their right mind (including themselves) would want them to resort to. In order to stay ahead, you cannot afford to stagnate and feel like a fat cat.
• deleted 4y ago
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• koube 4y ago
  Laptops from 2020 have been able to serve the needs of the vast majority of people. Laptops from 2015 even serve the needs of most. Why invent the m1 chip? Now imagine instead of a lesser product causing you to surf the web sightly slower, it instead causes your planes and pilots to be shot out of the sky. That is the reality that Russia and Ukraine are experiencing today. Plus, remember that the f35 is similarly priced and in some cases cheaper than 4.5 generation planes. It was designed from the start to scale well, or at least better than in the past.
• remarkEon 4y ago
  Speaking for myself (American, but an AFG veteran). Your description of how you view war is hopelessly naïve (no offense). Take out the whole “war” aspect to this and just think about it in terms of raw technology. “Why would we improve X? It works just fine with Y right now.” My guess is your aversion to continuous improvement in defense tech is really related to an aversion to war, which is all well and good, but irrelevant. The enemy also gets a say, and adversaries tend to invest in technologies that exploit your weaknesses - something Russia and China have assuredly done. So all this stuff you seem to think makes the US invulnerable may not actually work as well, because we have a bunch of new technologies out there for the first time. > The truth is, if we wanted to light up some country or other, we could totally do it - the reasons we don't are ethical/economical/politcal, it's not because our war planes are not advanced enough. There are new missiles that may, in fact, mean our bombers are not advanced enough. So, no.
  • epups 4y ago
    I think you and many others here are picking on the "easy" part of that reply. Of course we need to keep investing in any field if we want it to improve. Surely there are diminishing returns though. When you overspend your competitors so wildly, at some point it can be counterproductive. The US has the best army but it is far from the most cost-efficient, and the lack of investment in other parts of its society is clearly apparent. In a political scenario where lobbying, not actual strategy is the reason why so much money is spent on defense, it is your comment that sounds naive, not the parent.
    • remarkEon 4y ago
      Yes yes, I am a dumb US Army infantryman so I do struggle with "strategy" and so on and so forth. /s I can steelman your argument to be something like "without lobbying, DoD procurement would be much more efficient and the savings would be spent on social programs" ... which is just absurd. If you think that "lobbying" is the only reason that the US has a very very large defense budget that's on you, since the internet is widely available. Ad minimum, USN is responsible for policing the entire planet to allow trade to continue. The point of overspending your competitor (in the defense realm) is that you reach a point where they just can't catch up, or they realize it would take a decade (or many) to catch up and suddenly war makes zero sense ... unless there is a new technology that resets the gameclock. This has happened. And so, here we are, continuing to invest in new technology.
• Rimintil 4y ago
  It's not about being 'extremely good' at war. It's about being so overwhelmingly dominate, no one challenges you -- ever. Not doing anything (i.e., not developing weapons) will cause the US to slowly lose that footing. And we just need to look at how quickly the PLA(N) has caught up to the USAF/USN (I'm not saying they're an equal, today, but they've come leaps and bounds over 10-20 years ago). > crazy drones So does RU, CN, and Iran. > missiles See above. When it comes to long range air-to-air and hypersonic, the US is lagging. > submarines PLAN is deploying diesel-electric and AIP boats, which can be virtually silent. USN boats are all nuclear powered, which we're good at making them silent, but they'll never be as silent as diesel-electric/AIP. > nukes Should never be deployed. One of the things no one comes close to touching any of the US military branches on is our airlift and logistics. > How much better do you need to be at war? So much better than the other guy, you just need to rattle your sword, not use it. I don't disagree with you about investment into social services, though I feel they're broken not only by funding, but by capitalism itself. I think the other thing we have to remember is that the Military Industrial Complex employs a significant number of workers and even more, if you extend that into all points of State and Federal government that touches the military. Those companies and workers are taxed (maybe). Those taxes cycle back into the system, etc. What kind of system would we have without those millions of workers? No idea. Maybe they'd all be doing something else and my argument would fall flat, which would be great. Military bad? Yes. Military necessary? Probably, unfortunately, until we're no longer tribalistic. If necessity is a requirement, should we be so much better at it than anyone else on the planet that everyone keeps within their own borders? Yes. We can expect China to engage Taiwan within the next 6-8 years. And they're practicing for it. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/mock-attack-on-u-s-navy-vessels-underway-during-chinese-fighters-unsafe-intercept https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/mock-attack-on-u-s-nav... (So is Taiwan) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/taiwan-extends-mandatory-military-service-due-to-chinese-invasion-threat https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/taiwan-extends-mandato...
• jcranmer 4y ago
  If I have to be totally honest, the US military is probably too small for its political goals. Definitely in terms of keeping production and replenishment lines open [1]. But even for things like aircraft carriers, I don't think 11 aircraft carriers [2] are enough to achieve air superiority in Chinese littoral waters. Another point is that US military tactics are highly reliant on the US maintaining a technological superiority over its opponents. This means that weapon systems constantly have to be tossed out and replaced with newer variants as technology improves. And it's often cheaper to build from scratch than retrofit existing platforms to support new technology. [1] See the Russo-Ukrainian war, where both sides are running through things like artillery shells at something like 5-10× production rates. Even a short, "small" war consumes stockpiles ravenously. [2] The US has 11 aircraft carriers, but not all of them can be on active duty at the same time. The USN essentially runs 1 in active duty, 1 in reserve, and 1 in refit at any given time; I suspect the USN would struggle to even have 8 aircraft carriers in forward deployment at once, let alone concentrated in one active theater (don't forget, the US has commitments literally across the world that don't go away in war!).
  • dirtyid 4y ago
    Army taking up too much of the budget for future wars, but even if freed up, question is is it realistic medium/long term for US to build and sustain military large enough to deter peerish power like PRC with more streamlined acquisition and PPP advantage that is rapidly closing gap. All while fulfilling security commitments. There's also eventual near term concern of CONUS defense considering PRC pursuing long range strikes that's going to curtail US ability to overwhelming focus on expeditionary missions.
• jdougan 4y ago
  "The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win." -- Robert A. Heinlein Can't say it much better than that. Threats aren't static. Wise planners plan around enemy capabilities, not intentions. Even ignoring the more BS of the claims about who are our enemies, there are real ones. After getting caught unprepared in two world wars, the US people and military had decided it shouldn't happen again. Secondarily, the constitution doesn't really make allowances for a federal industrial policy, so the clearest constitutional levers they have are in the national defence area.
• pointlessone 4y ago
  I'd suggest that being just extremely good at war might be not quite enough. Even being the best might be not enough. It would suggest a victory but it still might be too costly. Look at Ukraine-Russia war, for example. It seems with western support Ukraine's victory all but guaranteed but because of small margin of superiority the war is approaching a year, loss is counted in 5 figures for men and billions of dollars for property. Russia still seem to hope to win because it has advantage in certain areas (e.g. troop numbers, nukes). If USA barged in in the first weeks of the war and made full might of its military available to Ukraine there would be no war by now (or there would be WW3 but that's not the point). The more obvious military superiority the shorter any conflict would be or there would be no military conflict in the first place. In a way, it's cheaper to buy expensive F35s (providing jobs for those who build them and for those who shoot patriotic clips for election campaigns) and show how big your stick is than to be drawn into a war with F16s and just barely win it. Another aspect is that the technology has to actually improve and that's expensive. Russian propaganda, for instance, was peddling Russian military superiority for decades. Putin kept saying "no analogues" at every opportunity. But it was just propaganda. They were trying to do it on the cheap. On the field they actually resort to WW2 era equipment.
• dogma1138 4y ago
  The cheapest way to win a war is to make it too expensive for anyone especially near peers to fight you, this is how the US won the Cold War. Whilst the US can maintain a decent defensive posture at a much lower cost the cost of an actual war when it comes (not if) would be far greater than any savings you’ll make along the way. It would also make it far more expensive for the rest of the world to boot, to some extent the US is subsidizing peace or reduction in the intensity of conflicts world wide which is what you do when you are a super power. Soft power comes mainly from having actual power to back it up, either direct or through alliances and if you look at smaller states with a lot of soft power most of them rely on long term cultural ties and alliances with the US. The reality is that the US can fund better healthcare, better public eduction and better public services in general without giving up its military spending its very difficult to for people to understand just how much wealthier the US is as a nation than everyone else. The US on a wider cultural level doesn’t seem to want these things, heck the cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone outstrips per capita the cost of just about every universal health care system even when accounting for the entire population of the US not just for those eligible for it. If the cost of healthcare in the US was similar to that of Germany it could outspend Germany 5 fold per capita whilst granting everyone in the US access to healthcare for what Medicare, Medicaid and the VA health expenditures currently cost.