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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

Thinking that this spending is ok based on your reasons amounts to a tacit acceptance of a huge amount of dishonesty, I find it quite cynical.

This is a totally ass-backwards way to do stimulus and domestic investing, with the upside that it lets you do stimulus and domestic investing while pretending you're not doing it, but doing something macho and patriotic instead.

This is a way to maintain US economic and diplomatic dominance while pretending it's all about Defense/The Homeland/Freedom(tm), all while telling all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded by (who this time?) and killing bewildered probably innocent (whooo?) that this is all about loving and defending your country.

If you can't openly sell empire to your citizens, maybe you shouldn't have an empire.

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I didn't see the part where I said anything about stimulus or investing.

WWII is what enabled the US to adopt this position, and its memory, rapidly fading into history, are why the US chose involvement and leadership of the world instead of isolation. Before WWII the US was (relatively) isolationist. You can claim that it would have been better off staying that way, but given the way things spiraled into WWII, the conclusion of US leaders was a reasonable one: we must lead, or else things will spiral into conflict once again, and we will not be able to contain, control, or ignore it.

How could they come to any other conclusion? They had already tried the "let's try to avoid picking sides and please can't we all just get along" option in WWI and it turned out, shall we say, badly.

None of this excuses the absolute folly of the US' many military misadventures, and likely huge amounts of waste (in terms of people and treasure) in pursuing them. I am merely pointing out that the idea that we could abolish most military spend because somehow the world will just get along by itself, or even that we can just ignore what happens elsewhere, is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time.

If you want a really cynical view: consider that military spending (at every level from large weapons systems down to local spending around military bases), veterans services, and general disability benefits are in some sense the only social spending accepted by a significant fraction of the population.

When I am feeling very cynical, I think of how government spending and pork-barrel politics reflect the same quirk of psychology seen in the marketing of burly SUVs and trucks to the segment that could otherwise be served by minivans and economy cars.

There are multiple points in the parent's post. While I agree that the idea of unnecessary military spending is noxious, the impact of safe global shipping and the unmeasurable deterrent effects for global stability may still be important. It's not clear to me how we measure and assess the value of this vs. hypothetical and more desirable alternatives.

If we weren't maintaining safe global shipping and other elements of global stability on the sly and with a self-serving twist, maybe the vacuum would have caused the global community to come together to achieve the same ends, in a more transparent and less lopsided and brutal (one can only hope) way.

While I agree that sounds nice, my intuition suggests that the incentives and scale would tend to lead towards conflict. It might be interesting to model the stability of systems like this, though it's a hard problem to model chaotic nonlinear dynamical systems. It's not even clear what the state variables should be, but I'm curious if anyone has tried this.

Maybe and Hope are the usually the best plans.

The planning equivalent of Thoughts and Prayers.

To speak to the parent's points -- WW1 happened and the League of Nations failed to prevent an even worse conflagration.

Say what you will about US v USSR, or the post-Cold War US hegemony, there has been no WWIII.

>all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded

Combat deaths in the US military are lower on average than roofers, steel workers, fisherman, loggers, and quite a few other professions.

So I don't think that argument holds water. There are actually some theories that the specific group of young males that join the military are safer than if they didn't due to traffic accidents and other stupid things that young males do when they've got too much free time and too little discipline.

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