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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is far too many americans take pride in how big and tough our military is. They equate military spending to might.

You propose "Hey, maybe 700 billion dollars on the military is excessive" and you get "But then china/russia/the terrorists/etc can invade us!"

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2.1m service members, over 700k civilians employed by the military directly [0]. Then you have the endless stream of military contractors, and you're looking at almost 1 out of every 50 working age people in America benefits directly from the federal military activity.

So yeah, of course people are taking pride in a big military since it provides so much of their community income.

0: https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-d...

That budget could still go to supporting their communities if we employed them doing more meaningful work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, etc.

For some perspective, often this money and manpower DOES go into improving local infrastructure. New Orleans levies were substantially more resilient in the last few weeks as a result of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Often? The Army Corps of Engineers had a budget of less than $8B in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers has three main missions, one of which is the civil side of things. I'm not sure how it breaks down budget-wise though.

But saying money spent on the military often flows into local infrastructure seems laughable.

Just because the military establishment is capable to pool together some skills/resources to polish its public image doesn't mean another non-militaristic public service (in whatever definition of the term) couldn't achieve same or better results.

It’s more than that. Culturally they US has a big population that is anti-large government social benefits, except in the concept of the military.

By joining the military you gain access to federally paid education, health care, social services, housing etc. that has broad political support. If you yanked those funds you’d decimate one of the foundational social safety nets in the States.

Nothing would be decimated if we yanked those funds other than our ability to destroy other nations. We could build a much better social safety system that covers far more people. It’s not as if military spending is the only option as far as this goes.

My point was that the military is a social safety net with broad political approval. Other options are much less popular.

I now understand and agree with your point.

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