Uh, guys, we should think about spending more on defense in the US

> And when we look back at our history, we see that in the 1950s and 1960s — the glorious postwar years of rapid and equitable growth and plentiful jobs — we spent far more on our military than we do now.

Yeah, but two important words in this sentence are no longer true today: equitable growth.

We taxed the ultra wealthy at a much, much higher rate than we do today and individual purchasing power was much higher.

The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 — roughly 40% of the median home value of $7,354 at the time, according to census data. This is no longer true as a median income doesn’t even qualify for 80% of purchasable homes today[0]

0: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/eighty-percent-homes-market...

Where are the dollars that show up on spreadsheets going?

> So anyway, if we’re going to be able to match Chinese military power — even in concert with all our friends and allies — we need to spend a lot more on the military. If you say this in public, someone will inevitably reply that “we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined”,[1] and call for cutting defense spending in order to fund either social spending or tax cuts, depending on which side of the political aisle they fall. But what does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations when China can build warships at 200 times the rate we can? What does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations if we can’t even keep up enough munitions production to supply Ukraine?

> Nothing. Dollars on paper mean nothing; shells and missiles and ships are real things that can be counted. As with health care and housing and train stations and everything else,[2] Americans have deluded themselves into believing that as long as they allocate dollars to something in a spreadsheet, then valuable and useful real stuff is actually getting built. Again and again, that delusion has been shattered when excess costs and interminable delays block the paper dollars from becoming real tangible goods.

As an engineer, I would like to see improvements in efficiency:

> Americans have deluded themselves into believing that as long as they allocate dollars to something in a spreadsheet, then valuable and useful real stuff is actually getting built. Again and again, that delusion has been shattered when excess costs and interminable delays block the paper dollars from becoming real tangible goods.

From construction of transportation to housing to energy infrastructure, things seem to take forever to build. California's high speed rail may never be completed.

If all out war breaks out between two nuclear powers I don’t think 155mm production/stockpiles are going to be quite as impactful as these folks say.

A lot of these screeching hawks are the same who were warning about the capabilities of Russia. China is still well behind technologically, and is also highly dependent on key imports for a lot of military components.

"But what does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations when China can build warships at 200 times the rate we can?"

Nothing - Physical attacks are becoming increasingly uninteresting, and our ability to target areas and kill everyone in an area don't need hundreds of warships anyway. That's only necessary if you want to be careful.

But much more importantly, taking out useful infrastructure no longer requires bombing literally all of it. Increasingly, you can render large swaths of civilian infrastructure totally unusable (and cause many many casualties) without firing many bullets or bombs.

As a result, being able to outgun China is becoming increasingly useless as a measure of whether you can "win".

(and this assumes nobody wants to just obliterate each other, but instead wants people left standing or land left usable)

This isn't to say there is no transition period, but this article definitely doesn't make an argument for skating to where the puck will be in the future, only skating to where the puck might be in the past.

If you aren't familiar with Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, I can't recommend it enough (both the book and the YouTube video). You'll understand a lot better where the U.S. is in it's history and why so much is the way it is.

https://youtu.be/xguam0TKMw8

First line of the article:

> The United States is in big trouble militarily. That’s the upshot of a new RAND publication…

So the defense think tank says we need to spend more on defense. Stop the presses!

Listen, if China literally attacks the US directly, the whole world has already lost. You might as well worry about how well-prepared we are for a direct comet strike.

I don't think the amount of money spent is the problem; https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-5...

Ugh substack - no one wants a quick way to “quote” something.

People please don’t mess with right click and text selection!!

I’m surprised that that the Ukraine war wasn’t talked about more. Not only did we go through a significant number of shells, but it also shows that the traditional warfare that large countries like the USA and Russia are geared for is out of touch. It’s like bringing a knife to a metaverse fight. Drones, portable missiles, and small groups have proven incredibly effective. Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy and Russian ships are wary of coming within a few dozen miles of the shore. Not only do we need to refactor our military for productivity, but we need to rethink what we want to build.

I once gave a presentation to a group of Senior Department of Defense managers on the role that management must play in the transition to modern software engineering. After I introduced risk-driven iterative development and it's ability to reduce waste and improve predictability by identifying and resolving big risks before making large investments, one of them suddenly rose and exclaimed

"If I had a nickel for every time we flushed $50M down the toilet, I'd be a rich man!"

There is enormous waste in the Department of Defense. Eliminating it would provide all of the funding needed - and then some.

military expansion into real territory and economic territory have some similarities; civilian economic activity produces goods and services (and culture) while military simply consumes, at least.

cage the beast

edit in fairness, some technology from dot-mil is quite good, and this forum is an indirect descendant of that. Dot-mil, in return for ample budgets and long timelines, brings tech back to civilian purposes, including addressing Climate and related. So, partnering with good limits, not blank checks, seems productive and appropriate. Dot-mil can pay society for producing and enriching them.

Last I checked, the USA spends more on military than the next nine nations, combined. Do we need to spend _more_, or do we need to change how we spend the vast amounts already collected?

This may be the stupidest thing I've ever heard...

Does a weaker US conventional military make nuclear war more or less likely? Does it make the world more or less stable. Does it cause alliances of democratic nations to strengthen or weaken, particularly in countries like South Korea?

These are questions worth asking as one considers priorities.

@dang Does this need to be flagged? Increased defense spending or changing defense spending priorities is an interesting topic that dovetails with both entrepreneurship and emerging technologies.

A defense industry think tank that exists solely to siphon money from the defense budget thinks the defense budget should be even larger!

Can we ban "sign up to read more" sites like substack to discourage their use in our corner of the internet?

The U.S. military has turned into little more than a glorified but lethal jobs program.

Since the U.S. doesn’t do “socialism” but some degree of socialism is very useful to keep your population productive, the US government has decided to hide its socialism in the guise of the military instead of just having a normal jobs program and/or industrial policy.

If the U.S. were to actually run the military for defensive purposes right now half the states in the country would go bankrupt and it would hit a massive recession.

Fortunately within the past year or so the US has begun returning to actual industrial policy so hopefully it can now start shifting its military to focus on actual military ends rather than as a job works program.

Let me tell you a story.

I'm coming at this from the technical publications side of things, but the same story is true for literally everything in MIL-STD acquisitions / procurement.

Let's say I'm a single-digit-headcount business and I have an amazing cupholder for the US Army. It's absolutely bulletproof, it fits all their vehicles, it's got a printed circuit thing in it that does all sorts of stuff, and it's maintenance-free (only needing to be tossed into the return bin when it goes bad).

I go to sell it to the army.

"But wait!" they say. "You need to provide MIL-STD-3031 documentation!".

OK. Where do I learn how to make documents in 3031 format?

"Ah, here is the standard implementation from LDAC. Pretty sweet, huh? Off you go!"

I page through 3031's LDAC implementation, and, lo-and-behold, the only spec files are for PTC Styler, an inordinately priced (and terrible) piece of software.

"Just add it to the contract!" says the Army. My LRIP charges go up by almost double, and now I have an entirely separate doc toolchain that needs to be sustained basically forever.

I float a review of the documentation, but it finds its way beyond the Procurement guys to the actual Program Office. The Program Office says, "3031?! No one uses 3031. It's faggy Euro S1000D crap. Use 38784 (MIL-STD-38784)."

38784 comes from where? "Oh, call these guys. Five Old Ex-Officers, Incorporated. They'll set you straight. Add 'em to the contract. They'll know how to do it. They're old buddies."

But wait, I say. What about 3031?

"Oh, just do a 3031 release for the requirement, and do rev service in 38784."

Needless to say, Five Old Ex Officers has me on a whole different toolchain, with no overlap whatsoever. The 3031 toolchain is running parallel. Needless to say, neither of these doc formats is parseable by any software written in the last two decades.

Do you want to know the running tab for documentation on this goddamn cupholder, before a single document has been put to paper? Assuming one writer and two reviewers, we're up to more than 150k annually, just for license costs and basic "maintenance" (which you can't opt out of - that's in the spec too)- not including styler, initialization, or whatever else, which will also include paying to bring a vendor team on-prem because you can't do cloud anything (due to ITAR and other requirements).

That's going to be, over five years, well over a million dollars. A million dollar cupholder manual - not even including the charges for doing any of the actual work (charges which will, themselves, be inflated because of the toolchain idiocy).

Now, repeat this for literally everything in the US Military.

Yeah.

These shenanigans need the world's biggest sledgehammer, yesterday, because I guarantee the PLAN doesn't do this bullshit. They need a manual, they find the best way to do a manual for the mission. You screw with that, you get re-educated.

Of course, "mission" is a big part of our problem here - the damage done to procurement over the period of the aughts was awesome, and can't be overstated. The GWOT was a farce. The Obama-era "drone war" was horribly counterproductive. The fact that we had only "acting" executive leadership from 2016-2020 didn't help things either; there are a lot of things that "Acting" SecDefs can't sign off on or force. Anyway. It's nothing a determined polity can't overcome. It all depends on how "determined" we want to be. I suspect that, as with 1941, "determination" will be fueled by dead and dying sailors in far off ports.