> the reflexive "spending money on war machines is bad" takes are really reductive and signal a shallow understanding of geopolitics and the global security sit

> the reflexive "spending money on war machines is bad" takes are really reductive and signal a shallow understanding of geopolitics and the global security situation I think if you revisit this comment chain, you’ll find that no one made that argument, and it almost seems like you are defensively projecting a straw man to fight. The original argument was about should we spend more money on defense (such as f35 development) given that we dominate the next 3 players put together by most metrics. Eg 11 aircraft carriers vs 2 (and yes I know that national defense does not simply boil down to num_carriers) I’m a strong advocate for the US military being the strongest in the world, but I’m anti the position that we need to be 5x the next spender. Edit: and yes, I’ll admit my understanding of the geopolitics and defense is indeed shallow, but from where I sit the “experts” got us into War in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before that. So maybe we need less of this “expert” thinking