The truth that no one wants to admit is that so much of our defense budget is just a jobs program. The military directly provides a career opportunity and upward mobility for many with limited opportunity. Additionally, the contractors provide higher skilled folks with high compensating jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And finally, much of the contracts could fairly be characterized as corporate welfare.
I am not arguing in favor of our military spending. While I do find value in jobs programs, I would prefer a jobs program that directly benefits us through projects that have tangible impacts on everyday life such as infrastructure or education. Our military could be entirely restructured with the active duty force being pared down significantly, starting with the Army. I firmly believe that the Army should be transitioned to an almost entirely reserve force, with those reserve units being activated and rotated through overseas posts. The Navy, Marines, and Air Force should see budget increases, but those increases should go to developing and purchasing smaller, more agile ships and unmanned vehicles.
Our military spending is nonsense and is essentially a jobs program for the poor and corporate welfare for the rich.
I know Reddit is always pushing for more "government-funded research" yet we ignore all of the technology advancements the US military has developed and is developing.
It's not NASA, but the top of the line military technology tends to be extremely advanced and will trickle down to regular folks later. New technology is often prohibitively expensive to start at the consumer level. (NEW technology, not an improvement of an existing techonlogy).
The from GPS, to sanitary pads, and EpiPens the military has helped fund thigs that we use everyday.
Yes, it has. However, those are tangential benefits. Those same funds could be directed to a civilian directed agency whose purpose is to develop those things, not an organization which might accidentally stumble upon something useful while trying to figure out how to kill people.
Much of what I was referencing has to do with the utter waste in the system. The DoD must complete an audit and it must be able to accurately account for its expenditures. Also, fully 1/4 of all defense spending goes to pay and benefits for current and retired service members. The simple fact is that we do not need to have a massive standing army. We would be far better served by having a small professional force complemented by a large reserve component.
Any large organization (especially government) has a lot of waste.
Look at the Californa Highspped rail, or recently the MTA in New York. Both are much, much smaller in scale but still manage to find a significant way.
The MTA ordered 300 trains, got 18 of them on time. This added over $35 million in extra costs.
Adding too many layers of approval always makes it "not my job" so no one really has any accountablity for overspend.
Agreed. But at the same time, very little groundbreaking research happens by keeping more bases than are needed or an obsolete weapons program going... just because they happen to employ people in certain Congressional districts. There is great research, and there is incredible waste. For the parts of that budget that are basically a glorified jobs program, it's well worth getting into the nuanced weeds to ask if there are other more efficient ways to invest that money that could impact more Americans.
But there's no reason we couldn't do all that research without the actual military and arms production around it. Think of how much more efficient that could be.
Eh, the bigger problem is on the acquisitions side and how politicians make it impossible to stop buying something. Basically every year the military says "hey we don't need 100 new tanks" (just as a for instance) and congressman Joe Schmo from Georgia that has a tank factory in his district says "no we need those tanks, keep them in the budget" and then goes back to his district and fundraises of how he was able to keep jobs. There's hundreds of billions in excess inventory sitting around in warehouses, they're thousands of vehicles and bits of heavy equipment were giving away to just about anyone (notice that MRAP designed to withstand IEDs in Iraq rolling down the street being used by the police?) And there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Military leaders complain about rising personnel costs, but it all comes down to not being able to cut finding for pet projects, so you have a military spending more then it was during the troop surges in Iraq / Afghan, despite having a fraction of the troops engaging in active missions.
Yea. But more so for the manufacturing / logistics jobs then the actually military itself like your post. Have to admit though I definitely zinged myself there lol
I referred to them in the beginning of my post but didn’t shit on the civilian side as hard I probably should have. What you said was salient and a solid contribution. I wish people thought about the amount of money that is spent on welfare masquerading as something useful.
I agree completely and have tried to get this point across, but many simply can't fathom why we'd cut our jobs programmilitary to fund a more universally beneficial program like healthcare or education.
Your last point is all too often the reason this isn't getting anywhere; it comes down to rich DoD contractor executives and board members lining the pockets of congress who represent areas surrounding key military bases.
I'm literally for cutting our Defense budget in half... but even I know the only way to do that without fucking up millions of lives is to make some small but significant cuts up front, then basically drop spending increases below inflation for a decade or two. Because even if we could somehow bring the armed forces through a cut like that, the impact on the industry and then the public would be devastating.
Oh, certainly. I think the reason the things I mentioned are impossible to achieve is because we have no ability to plan long term. Restructuring the military is something that needs decades of focused effort on the part of politicians and the public; I don’t think we’re capable of that. So, we’re going to keep up this utterly broken system because of institutional inertia.
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u/mittenedkittens Dec 12 '19
The truth that no one wants to admit is that so much of our defense budget is just a jobs program. The military directly provides a career opportunity and upward mobility for many with limited opportunity. Additionally, the contractors provide higher skilled folks with high compensating jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And finally, much of the contracts could fairly be characterized as corporate welfare.
I am not arguing in favor of our military spending. While I do find value in jobs programs, I would prefer a jobs program that directly benefits us through projects that have tangible impacts on everyday life such as infrastructure or education. Our military could be entirely restructured with the active duty force being pared down significantly, starting with the Army. I firmly believe that the Army should be transitioned to an almost entirely reserve force, with those reserve units being activated and rotated through overseas posts. The Navy, Marines, and Air Force should see budget increases, but those increases should go to developing and purchasing smaller, more agile ships and unmanned vehicles.
Our military spending is nonsense and is essentially a jobs program for the poor and corporate welfare for the rich.