It doesn't go up in smoke, it goes back into the economy.

The medical advances of military spending alone are breathtaking.

> It doesn't go up in smoke, it goes back into the economy.

There is still a gigantic opportunity cost of bringing together resources to produce an explosion rather then something more useful.

The old 'its going back into the economy' is some sneaky Keynsian language that only applies in certain macro economic situation and even that was mostly wrong and a misunderstanding of economic theory in the late 30s.

A large proportion of it is just destroyed. Along with human lives. Sure the money seems to come back around, but that's an accounting trick: it's printed by the guys paying anyway. The human labour and lives invested are gone, unless what they did is one of the fraction of the work permitted to spill into civilian life. A million man hours go into a warship's hull alone. What else could those hands and minds have done?

You can fund medical research without spending a million dollars sending a man to a desert, having his legs blown off, and flying him home. Hell, the US especially could actually use that research on civilians without bankrupting them!

And what about rebuilding bombed out cities? Is there so little else to improve?

> the money seems to come back around, but that's an accounting trick

It’s also a sociological trick. Societies support massive military R&D in ways that are impossible for public projects. We could wish upon a star that humans weren’t as we are. Or we can work with reality.

>> The human labour and lives invested are gone

Military innovation is also historically a jobs program.

Check out how many states & companies are part of R&D/Manufacturing for the F-35.

I mean with just the few things they listed the ROI has been insanely good.

If you spent even a fraction of the defense budget of the world on education and civilian research, you can still have those things and more. Without having to snuff out a few million people and rebuild every city in Europe and half of Asia at the same time. You could still pay those scientists, you know!

ARPANET was military in origin, but "the Internet" happened at CERN, a civilian project.

The ROI on CERN then, is astronomical, as it only cost a few billion. Less than a month of a war in a desert that achieved...what?

And if ARPANET hadn't happened (because the US wasn't worried about having a chunk of comms destroyed in a nuclear war), the NPL in the UK was also working on packet switching networking in the 60s, and that was a civilian-industrial thing. So something roughly Internet-shaped would probably have happened anyway.

While on the subject of the NPL, they also developed the first atomic clock. So then GPS also has a non-military underpinning.

> but "the Internet" happened at CERN, a civilian project

The web happened at CERN, not the internet.