Alternatively. The USAF are a bargain for a more stable world with less regional conflicts. While the Middle East is a disaster, and there are many easy to point out missteps on its record that truly are awful and horrific.

It's also currently the world's pre-eminent power in a history dominated by strong militaries and during its tenure as such the world has unequivocally been more stable and peaceful than it's ever been statistically.

The access to free trade over more porous borders has lifted billions of people out of poverty. Europe hasn't been this peaceful ever as far as I can tell. Every major democracy in the world exists under America's umbrella.

Certainly it's not all roses, Iraq was probably just a decade of war crimes, but we can see what happens as soon as we leave places like Afghanistan (wasn't perfect, but was certainly a lot better a year ago than today), Syria (Kurds abandoned have to re-align with Russia, Turkish troops move in), Philippines (never even left after Duterte quickly reconsidered given China's encroachments in the S China Sea).

Pulling the US military into a more isolationist or more equal to others stance would almost certainly result in more regional conflicts around the world as the stakes go from "hey we definitely won't win this thing" to "hey, we've got a fighting shot here".

I think that's a very rosy view of US intervention. In particular, the US has helped overthrow numerous democratic governments because they were not ideologically aligned with the kind of free trade maximalism the US favours. Indonesia and Chile are particularly notable examples here.

It's unclear if US actions have created a more stable world, but they have certainly created one more aligned with the US ideologically, often at the cost of lives, local economies, and continued instability.

Edit: Also, RE Afghanistan. Forget a year ago, the argument could be made that it would have been better off if the US had never invaded in the first place.

Yea, I generally am a bigger fan of what the US does just by being there than I am of our actual interventions in places which can frequently be seen as short sighted, bloody, and against our own principles at times.

But from a world composed of far more people that those in Chile, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, and South America. I think we've done a decent job overall from a historical perspective of promoting a fairly stable world during Pax Americana. With quite a few missteps along the way.

My point isn't that it's perfect, my point is that... all things considered, for a really large amount of the world's population, things aren't _that bad_ given historical context.

Sure, the child laboring to make phones in China isn't going to wax poetic about the wonders of Pax Americana. But my point is more... child labor was only more frequent in histories past.

Sure the murdered wedding goers in Afghanistan won't be happy about the state of affairs but civilians dying erroneously during combat operations has been a near constant in world history and at this point you're less likely to die in that manner than ever before.

You could argue that it's a result of larger populations but I'm not certain about that given Kazakhstan; Syria; China in Xianjiang, Hong Kong, the S China Sea, and Taiwan; Russia in Georgia, Crimea, and the rest of Ukraine; Myanmar; basically the entire Middle East.

It's easy to talk about how bad the USAF is, they've done a lot of bad shit over the years, my impression is it's still better than the alternative.

In a vacuum, someone will step in, and that someone as of now is China and/or Russia.

The US is certainly no saint, but I think someone(s)? have said that considering the alternatives *, you could do a lot worse.

* Realistic alternatives that is. I too would love to see us achieve world peace and ditch all weapons. But that's probably never going to happen as long as humans are not extinct.

Wasn’t the military which overthrew democratic governments though. It was the CIA.

This is a pretty important delineation.

They dont also fall under the DOD? (I am not a US citizen, genuine question)

Also want to echo sentiments about roaming profiles and how annoying they can be.

You would hope so, but they report to the director of national intelligence (a member of the president's cabinet) and are not a subdivision of the DOD. They infamously have their own budget, funded by their own means, and have somewhat of a rivalry with other parts of the government. The Department of National intelligence is the DOD's version of the CIA.

I would support a more pro-active humanistic military, but many humanitarian causes have been left to the United Nations. The US knows its legitimacy (as well as political support) will come into question in those scenarios. How about we strengthen UN instead?

I'm certainly very pro working cooperatively with other Democratic nations to secure a more just and peaceful future less dominated by a singe nation state.

The problem is, alliances fray (Turkey, Belarus, Britain, the United States... we've all had our issues with current alliances and treaties in recent history alone). And that gets problematic and very hairy.

The other issue is, a single state dominance is prone to being coopted by less than benign actors and we've certainly seen that in the US I believe, especially given our invasion of Iraq.

So there's no cure alls on these things unfortunately. As a general practice I believe brining more members under our umbrella and strengthening the organizations like NATO and the UN which can act as a cooperative unit and not as a unilateral actor is a positive.

Beware of personal bias.

While I agree that we over-fund out military, probably by an order of magnitude, I still want our military to be functional. And that requires good IT. The two goals should not be mutually exclusive.

IT departments in large organizations often see their users as adversaries rather than customers. The department's goal isn't to enable productivity but to prevent computing. This is probably WAI.

Sounds like somebody thinks they need root access to the production servers.

Try getting an unprivileged Python REPL to run on a “managed” computer. (Yet you can probably make arbitrary kernel32.dll calls from an Excel spreadsheet.)

It’s however also the way that the US funds private sector development. They can’t as directly fund and direct private corporations as that would be “communism”, so they pump money into the military such that it provides corporate welfare and spurs private sector innovation and economy diffusely. It’s inefficient by design this way.