> I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending money on military and instead spent it on research and science.

You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to spend on their military?

And even if you did manage to zero out the military budget without getting conquered, it's completely unreasonable to think that money would be reallocated to "research and science" in a democratic society. Almost all of it would go into stuff like basic infrastructure, social programs, and maybe culture war stuff. While comfortably employed geeks may sit in awe of the pretty space pictures, most people have more quotidian concerns they care far more about.

So the fantasy is really one about a science-enthusiast world-dictator securely protected by his secret police.

> You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to spend on their military? [...] So the fantasy is really one about a science-enthusiast world-dictator securely protected by his secret police.

I think that's a failure of imagination, and that vision isn't one that history necessarily supports. Humans used to exist in small roving bands. Now we are organized into nation-states. I don't see a truly compelling reason why that trend towards greater organization can't continue. I am also certainly capable of imagining a world government that is responsive to the needs of people, maintains global peace and security, and focuses the vast majority of its budget towards constructive, not destructive, ends.

I recognize that this doesn't look likely in the immediate future, but:

- An alternative consisting of warring nations equipped with civilization-ending weapons is surely not the only path forward (it better not be, if we hope to stick around).

- We are increasingly faced with existential problems that require a globally coordinated response.

- Change often happens a lot faster than we think possible. The order of things is set in stone until suddenly it's washed away and everything is different.

> Humans used to exist in small roving bands. Now we are organized into nation-states. I don't see a truly compelling reason why that trend towards greater organization can't continue.

The former is the answer to the latter here. Humanity is trending to a more unified, globalized, monolithic series of structures. Smaller cultures, countries and people groups have been conquered, dimmed, and "globalized". You can easily observe this in art and architecture.

To be clear: you need both. Ironically, thinking that you can exist without a defensive military response is the real failure of imagination :/.

    Humans used to exist in small roving bands. 
    Now we are organized into nation-states. 
    I don't see a truly compelling reason why that 
    trend towards greater organization can't continue.

Empathy and compassion.

It's reasonable expectation for a person to care about the others in their "small, roving band." Evolution has selected for those that do, or at least it did for most of human history.

But how far does that scale? Can we truly care about everybody in a village of 100? What about a territory with 1000 people? What about a small country of 100,000? What about a nation with 1,000,000 people or 1,000,000,000 people?

We're not robots. If we were, then larger organizational structures would perhaps clearly be the way. Look at all the wasted, duplicated effort between countries and states.

But we're humans and we need some level of empathy and compassion for our fellow group-members for this stuff to work. When the organizational structure gets large enough it becomes dominated by cliques, infighting, etc. Now you just have warring nation-states with an extra level of abstraction.

I think we're seeing this right now in the United States. This country is too big, too populous, too divided to be effective any more. Unified successes like Webb are quickly becoming the exception, not the norm.

> But how far does that scale? Can we truly care about everybody in a village of 100? What about a territory with 1000 people? What about a small country of 100,000? What about a nation with 1,000,000 people or 1,000,000,000 people?

We now have the benefit of awareness. We can know what is happening to far away people. If anything, the current obvious changes in climate/weather and the associated impacts are evidence that we should have some motivation to care about things that impact those beyond just our own group (even though selfishly speaking it is because we know it ultimately will benefit our local group too).

When there is a major disaster, you will see people with very differing opinions drop their "simple" conflicts and work together. There is some recognizable human drive to help those visibly in need. Or maybe it's just an instintive behavior to ensure human survival.

Really, most of our political and ideological squabbles are manufactured by "leaders", and adopted by followers because we all have too much time on our hands. If we were collectively operating in survival mode, I think we might be a more cohesive society. Not that I'm asking for that; I like comfort.

Right, but how many far-away people can you care about? There's the distance factor and then there's the quantity factor.

    When there is a major disaster, you will 
    see people with very differing opinions 
    drop their "simple" conflicts and work 
    together. 

This is true, and one of the best parts of human nature.

But does it scale to tricky, nuanced, thorny questions?

A natural disaster is an entirely unambiguous event. We all think, "Earthquake bad. People trapped under rubble bad." and want to help them directly or indirectly. Some of us help more vigorously than others and some do nothing, but we all agree that the earthquake is bad and we would like the poor victims to suffer less.

It's harder to scale this cohesion up to tackle issues that are actually thorny and nuanced. Look at how fractured many countries were regarding COVID-19 and the vaccines, for example. Or the eternal Israel/Palestine conflict. Or whatever.

"We haven't tried real pacifism before"

Imagining a world government as anything but dystopian is a failure of imagination

Pretty much the opposite is true, by definition of the word "imagination".

So why isn't michigan conquering ohio or vice versa right now? Why aren't the canadians from the hinterland coming in to take over vancouver? Because they are "on the same side" which is ultimately a meaningless political device. It's still humans versus humans in michigan or ohio or the U.S. or anywhere else. It stands to reason that one day we could possibly be all on the same side, and we could have no fear of conquest from our fellow humans, just like those humans who are in michigan have no fear of conquest by ohioans today. In that world, having an advanced military would be about as useless as an ohio police department having ICBMs.

There are so many parallels and analogies to this idea, but there's a reoccuring pattern where some system becomes dominant and then seems to lose the characteristics which made it successful, ultimately becoming doomed.

You see this in business, where companies climb to the top through aggression and innovation, but then become laggards and protectionists (and ultimately fall away). You see it in countries. You see it in technologies. Heck, you see it in biological systems.

Perhaps that's just a normal part of the greater process, these cycles of growth, innovation, collaboration, etc., followed by stagnation and decay (and then death, or near-death, whereby the system returns to the growth effort).

The nice thing about being human is that we theoretically have the capacity to choose what our goals are (assuming our basic needs are currently met). As such, we could be choosing to work on goals such as "everyone always has food, shelter, and physical safety". This surely must be achievable, but maybe it would take virtually everyone working toward this goal. It's not really a sexy way to spend your time if you are already fortunate enough to have those things... such as if you live in a place rich in resources and with relatively few people. You would not be particularly compelled to contribute to the wellbeing of others, especially if you could not see them. But we have the privilege of awareness and knowledge, so we can see that there are still many people without even food or water. We could do something about this if we made it our focus.

And it might just turn out that having this collective focus would save our collective lives later. There's a reasonable chance that humanity will face a food crisis due to climate change and population growth. Practicing now at learning how to solve these problems might mean the difference between humans existing into 2100 or not.

> While comfortable employed geeks may sit in awe of the pretty space pictures, most people have more quotidian concerns they care far more about.

As the great Gil Scott-Heron once said: "A rat done bit my sister, Nell with whitey on the moon."

> As the great Gil Scott-Heron once said: "A rat done bit my sister, Nell with whitey on the moon."

I didn't know the reference, but I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nzoPopQ7V0 (2 min)

As William Gibson put it "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed"

Probably the best application of that quote I've ever seen :-)

The US could spend 2 times less on military and still be the biggest one in the world. And it as allies everywhere.

Can I just sidetrack this conversation? I've seen this new neologism "2 times less", which I infer from context means "half as much", and I don't like it.

Surely '2 times less' is minus 100% less, if the amount originally spent is '1 times'?

It's an illogical phrase to be sure.

I think its like saying:

"2 times (but instead of mutiplying do the oposite thing that makes it smaller)"

Is where the "logic" comes from.

Hm, I bet this parses as well:

"An hour is .5 times more then a half hour."

Although not quite as well.

Unfortunately this is far from new. I tried fighting it for years and just gave up. Save yourself the grief. We already lost.

it is bad grammar: you cannot use comparative adjectives on uncountable nouns

that said, when I read it I did not notice. my brain automagically converted the phrase to half. the context was not lost but it is murky territory

Last president pushed hard for NATO counties to up their military spending to agreed levels. Everyone laughed.

Russia has been an excellent motivator for our allies to get serious on defense spending.

Our absurdly oversized military has prevented a lot of serious wars.

This is revisionist/wrong.

Obama also pushed for more spending in NATO - and got commitments to do so as % of GDP. Growth was generally higher but spending was moving towards the % committed to.

What the last guy did was tried to piss out allies off and destroy NATO. Even then most in the US generally agreed w.r.t defense spending, just thought he was going about getting our allies to do it counter productively and not recognizing the fact that they were spending more (mostly from commitments made during Obama's 2 terms).

Folks who worked with trump claim he was planning on pulling the US out of NATO in his second term:

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-nato-pay-fair-s... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/obama-warns...

https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-tru... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

The same guy who thinks NATO should have been abolished and who fawned over Putin?

The guys like him and Putin are ignorant little boys who will thankfully die off soon. We must try to find a different path.

Just drinking the Hillary kool-aid I see.

If I were going to drink any politician's kool-aid, it would have been Bernie's. Hillary Clinton was part of the problem, just as most other sitting politicians are part of the problem.

> The US could spend 2 times less on military and still be the biggest one in the world. And it as allies everywhere.

I don't think it's that simple: stuff costs more in the US vs other big military spenders, large != effective, etc. If the US cut its military budget, it would have to give up capabilities, and that will have bitter consequences (e.g. the liberal order will shrink even further (e.g. goodbye Ukraine, Taiwan, Baltics), China owns the seas, etc.).

Given how some think the lessening of US Navy projection of power and securing shipping lanes around the world is what's leading to global instability, and global stability has been very good for US economics the last 50+ years, a case can probably be made that at least some of that military spending in the past was extremely effective and useful.

The theory is new to me, so I don't know enough about it to know how much I buy into it, but it's an interesting one.

> lessening of US Navy projection of power

While they continue to have more money allocated to them, operational mishaps occur more often, and navies look increasingly vulnerable in a real fight (see for instance the Moskva). Clearly "at least some of that military spending in the past was extremely effective and useful" isn't sufficient guidance on how to continue spending money.

I wonder if this is actually true in practice. I think many of these countries, especially China & India are incentivized to understate how much they actually spend on their defense. Another factor is the cost of labor and goods is so different that even though the US is spending far more actual dollars, the actual output might not be as big of a difference as these articles might have you believe.

Historically, countries almost never understate the strength of their armed forces because that would invite pointless conflicts with weaker adversaries. Unless the former is looking for some casus belli to invade the latter, it leads to the most pointless loss of life where the latter never stood a chance anyway but the former has to waste resources on the defense.

I don't know how that calculus changes in the context of modern superpowers or China's ambitions for Taiwan but that's the reasoning historically.

How can you possibly know how much a country spent on military to conclude they almost never understate their funding?

A perfect reason a country may understate their military spending is to hide their capabilities. For that matter, they may overstate their spending as well.

You have to ask yourself why a country would want to hide (as in demote) their capabilities.

Overstating their capabilities is perfectly understandable.

There’s a paper I read recently that adjusts for specifically military related purchasing power parity, in which case China was spending about 50% and Russia about 30% of the US. And of course in their region that might mean a locally more capable military, or the inability of the US to fight multiple wars simultaneously while maintaining global freedom of navigation for shipping, etc.

A lot of our capabilities is simply being present (overseas bases) and being able to move to a theater of war (logistics).

We are unlikely to ever fight a meaningful war with either Canada or Mexico, at least there are no signs of that ever being a possibility in my lifetime. Our adversaries are pretty much all overseas, and I’m pretty sure the Coast Guard could single-handedly defend against the threat posed by a possible Cuban invasion.

So we have to spend on logistics and overseas bases and support infrastructure for those bases, in addition to our nuclear arsenal, satellites, the War against rust, communications technology, aircraft carriers, aircraft, submarines and artillery and all manner of other things which are intended to keep us in the lead in terms of capabilities, effectiveness and deadliness.

At the point that you're talking about being able to simultaneously fight the next two military powers right in their respective backyards, you're no longer talking about defense.

As for freedom of navigation, China is also in favor of that. It's their lifeblood.

>As for freedom of navigation, China is also in favor of that.

Sorta-kinda. It’s complicated.

Vietnam, the US, the Philippines and others have clashed with China over the “Nine Dash Line.” China— and Taiwan, oddly enough— refuses to respect the ruling of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Tribunal on this matter. They’ve harassed other countries’ fishing vessels and maritime police in the region, sinking at least one. There are ongoing tensions in the area between China and other countries’ navies. China asserts sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, while other countries and the UNCLOS disagree and assert their right to freedom of navigation for military vessels. This has implications for customs and maritime law enforcement.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/chinese-vietna...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

Not so odd in the case of Taiwan: I like them, they’re the China as far as I’m concerned the UN and State Department be damned on this front, but it’s worth remembering that Taiwan officially does not see themselves as just an island nation off the coast of China. They claim the mainland, and all the island territories held by the mainland, and even Mongolia and some other land that the PRC has given up its claims to to settle border disputes. They’re not likely to back down on any of their claims no matter how small.

Some people in Taiwan might be willing to give that up in exchange for a guarantee of independence but as far as I know this is not at all a settled matter for them. It’s very much like North Korea/South Korea.

> China asserts sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, while other countries and the UNCLOS disagree and assert their right to freedom of navigation for military and other countries' navies

China does not object to transit through the South China Sea. China objects to foreign military vessels entering into the territorial waters within 12 miles of what it considers its own islands. The US and its allies conduct these "freedom of navigation" operations explicitly in order to challenge Chinese sovereignty over said islands and reefs.

But what you're discussing here is sovereignty over a certain set of islands and reefs that China (and several other countries) claims, not freedom of navigation through international waters.

Yes, that’s how China sees it. Other countries see the creation of artificial islands and reefs via dredging and landfill as a pretext to restrict navigation in the South China Sea. It’s complicated, hence sort-kinda.

> restrict navigation in the South China Sea

China's aim is, quite clearly, to prevent the US Navy from operating in the South China Sea in the case of a war. That's not a question of freedom of navigation, and the US "freedom of navigation" operations have to go out of their way to go near the islands China claims.

China is additionally interested in the resources under the South China Sea, just as all the other countries that occupy various islands and reefs are. This, again, is not an issue of freedom of navigation.

China isn't about to block shipping through the South China Sea.

Less true than you’d think. America outspends the rest of the world by an incredible margin and could probably happily halve its budget without being invaded by Canada or Mexico. Many European countries have spectacularly (too) low levels of defence spending and are still doing Ok, because they’re free-riding on NATO. Ukraine spent quite a lot, and spent it well, but Russia’s so much larger it doesn’t make enough of a difference.

But yeah, there are many things we could better be spending the defence budget on than galaxy formation research.

You almost had it. The US spend a good portion of the defense budget propping up NATO which is why European countries can get by with spending less. Love him or hate him, what Trump was trying to do in getting NATO to pull its fair share in defense spending was a good idea. Sure the US could spend waaay less and still ensure it won't get invaded (they'd have to come by sea or from Canada or Mexico). But Europe would piecemeal become part of a new Russian or Chinese Union.

You almost had it. Obama during his two terms pushed other NATO members to increase their spending to the 2% GDP target. They agreed and set long term goals to increase their spending and started to do so.

Trump stupidly described other NATO members as "owing" the US. Not only had several countries met their spending goals by the end of the Obama admin most of the alliance was on track with increased spending including targeted equipment upgrade spending. Trump's complaints were that other NATO members hadn't met their goals ahead of the agreed upon schedule. This was going to be used for a pretext for withdrawing the US from NATO.

NATO funding is not a simple issue. There's direct and indirect expenditures that "fund" NATO. It's not some protection racket. Funding can be direct funding I.e. military units/equipment maintained as a rapid response force or indirect funding I.e. spending to upgrade or buy equipment to keep up with the overall norms of the alliance.

Just a few thousand years ago we didn't spend huge parts of our useful resources and lives on militaries.

I really don't see how our imagination has shrunk so far that we all participant and perpetuate this fantasy that a world full of violence, much of which is created by the US, is the world we must continue to live in.

Ancient Romans spent as much as 80% of their state budget on the military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_the_Roman_army

The military was the “the largest item of state expenditure” during much of China’s Tang Dynasty.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-h...

Compared to this, 4% of the US GDP or 12% of annual US federal spending seems like a bargain, especially if you’re Germany.

They extracted a return on that investment, at least in the early days of the empire. A lot of land, gold, and slaves were returned to Rome by their military.

comparing percent of federal spending is an odd way of doing things since the scope of government has noticably broadened.

Yes and no. The total economic pie was much smaller in antiquity, limiting the potential maximum scope of government. Even so, entitlement spending still took up its share of ancient budgets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

'Twas ever thus.

I less agree that we would get conquered without a huge military. Hard agree about the social stuff though, in order to satisfy us we require exactly more than whatever we have at that moment, so spending on social well-being is limitless.

> You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to spend on their military?

I think this stop being true in 1945.

> I think this stop being true in 1945.

Huh? Russia (nee the Soviet Union) and the US are neighbors, if you've forgotten. They had a big ideological rivalry that started to get intense around that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait

And how many invasions have you noted across the Bering Straits since 1945?

The world changed.... You dont need an 800bn standing army any more.

I think they're referring to the nukes

> You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to spend on their military?

There is no proof of that, not historic or otherwise. In fact there is evidence to the contrary, as previous times of less military spending seem to correlate with more peaceful times. Your claim on who lives in a fantasy world is entirely unfounded, and one can just as easily state that your description is the fantacy one.

> In fact there is evidence to the contrary, as previous times of less military spending seem to correlate with more peaceful times.

What is the evidence? My impression has been militarily weak countries got invaded by stronger ones. Smaller countries were snapped up by bigger ones. I’m curious to see the evidence to the contrary.

Just look at a graph of global military spending interlaced with time-periods of relative global peace. You will find a remarkable—but ultimately unsurprising—correlation. You will find for example that after the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, global conflicts reduced dramatically along with less military spending.

Pre-industrialization, governments used to spend upwards to 90% GDP on their military, and tiny countries existed back then as they do today. Today there are quite a few smaller countries (and a handful of medium sized ones) that don’t even have military at all. I think your narrative of smaller countries being snapped up by bigger ones is not a historic pattern at all.

A large portion, 23%, of military budget is paychecks, healthcare, retirement for veterans. Tons more counting employees of all the industries that make up the industry portion of the military-industrial complex.

A huge amount of the military budget is research and science.

> some breakthroughs that come from military research

rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction - that's just things I know from being in tech (and knowing some history). I'm sure if I was a chemist, materials scientist, engineer, or doctor I'd be able to name tons more from those fields.

> A large portion, 23%, of military budget is paychecks, healthcare, retirement for veterans.

Does it? I'm no military nor budgeting expert, but quick search seems to say it's closer to ~5% of the total military budget that goes to veterans, see https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget/ve... for one example

Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the military? Some of those things are also borderline not invented by the military at all, but lets disregard that for now.

>Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the military?

I don't think we'd have GPS (for example) without the military, among other things like nuclear energy/weapons and so on.

Do you seriously think a corporation would have invested the money creating everything needed from the ground up, including ongoing maintenance of a satellite constellation, to let people fix their location on the earth? Where's the profit/ROI in that?

> I don't think we'd have GPS (for example) without the military, among other things like nuclear energy/weapons and so on.

I think you are wrong. Nations that don’t have a military (e.g. Iceland and Costa Rica) still build entire systems of lighthouses, they chart the seas, they map their mountains etc. Countries spend a lot of money into civilian infrastructure. The ROI is in enriching local industry. A GPS system is no bigger ask for civilians then e.g. a railway network. In both cases the ROI is huge for local industry.

As for nuclear energy. A lot of the scientist working on the bomb later became a huge proponents of non-proliferation (J. R. Oppenheimer being a prominent example). I think it is safe to say that the same scientists would have been even happier to work on the technology even if the motive was entirely peaceful.

I believe you're misreading the breakdown - I read that as "23% of budget goes to personnel costs, which include paychecks (for active duty), healthcare (for military and their dependents until 26), and retirement for vets"

I fully believe that only 5% of the budget goes to Veterans Affairs, at least in the US. The system is not very good at taking care of vets/

>Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the military? Some of those things are also borderline not invented by the military at all, but lets disregard that for now.

The list:

>>rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction

* Rockets are an entirely military invention - the Hargrave rocket invented for the British Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, the chinese pseudo-rockets used as artillery, the V2 rocket used in WW2 Germany, etc. I think one of the only non-military rocket scientists known to history is Goddard.

* Jets - also an entirely military invention. I'm assuming you mean "jet air craft" here - WW2 was the first use of jets to power an airplane. The Soviets and Americans quickly followed suit.

* Encryption - encryption has been in use in militaries since at least the roman era; another name for a substitution cypher is a "Ceaser Cypher." To be fair, this isn't exclusive to military use, as states have an interest in keeping their communications secure, as do banks, but in terms of "money invested in development of cryptography as we know it," the field was effectively invented whole hog during WW2 (again), as (military led and funded) analysis of how codes could be broken lead to the need for new encryption methods that were more secure. See also: the NSA. (note - I'm being sloppy with codes/cyphers/encryption here)

* RADAR/SONAR - literally developed during WW2 by the British using US funds in order to detect submarines and the Luftwaffe terror attacks. The germans had a very sophisticated RADAR tech at the beginning of the war (directed radar for night defense), but failed to develop it any further.

* Internets - the internet, as a system of interconnected computer networks, was funded by ARPA/DARPA, the DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA-net was first used by the Pentagon. Pretty much the entire US software and hardware industry was built off of US defense contracting, and this is no exception.

* Canning/Food preservation - the biggest advances in canning/food preservation were the result of studies/competitions funded by the British Royal Navy in the 18/19th centuries. The British defense industry funded the development of canned goods as we understand them today. Interestingly, this is where a lot of our understanding about vitamins started to be learned by (heavy) trial and error, as the RN tried to figure out how to combat scurvy.

* Weather prediction - meteorology as a science got tons of money from (you guessed it) the British Royal Navy, who understandable wanted to better predict conditions for their large navy that was made of wood and canvas. in the 20th century, meteorology got huge infusions of cash from the USAF, because planes care about weather and storms to a huge degree. This was a scientific field outside of the military, but even then, it was a matter of State security to predict the weather so you could understand crop growth patterns etc.

So, to answer your question, no, I don't believe any of those technologies would have developed organically.

> Rockets.

From the wikipedia of V-2 Rockets:

> The world's first large-scale experimental rocket program was Opel-RAK under the leadership of Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, a collaborator of Oberth, during the late 1920s leading to the first manned rocket cars and rocket planes,

Looks like rockets were invented before a global war broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military used that invention for violence, as a global war broke out.

Just because an invention is used for war doesn’t mean it required one to be invented.

>Looks like rockets were invented before a global war broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military used that invention for violence, as a global war broke out.

This presupposes that the V2 is the first use of rocketry in history which...well, it's just not true. You conveniently skipped over the bit about Congreve rockets, which were invented in the late 18th/early 19th century, explicitly for war, or the growing evidence about the use of gunpowder rocketry in Imperial China. Both of these uses were explicitly NOT peaceful. (not hargreve, I misremembered in the OP post).

Also, if you bother to read the article you referenced, it makes it clear that literally nothing came of the experiments apart from that book. It took a war to get the funding and manufacturing resources available to actually _do the work_ of advancing rocketry.

EDIT: to sound less like an asshole and engage with the comment on its face value.

Technological inventions connect like a web. There is a reason James Burke named his show “Connections”. We can move the goal post for any given invention wherever we like, really. If V-2 wasn’t invented for the military, then we can simply move the goalpost such that we mean another type of rocket, but make sure not to move it sideways such that the invention could be used as a transport propellant or for signalling.

But I wish to step aside now and acknowledge how silly this whole argument is—as most arguments are when it comes to alternate history. Historically the military has been the most well funded of all government enterprises so it should come as no surprise that many innovations happen under such well funded programs. But that does not mean that is the only possible outcome. Humans kept innovating and inventing even as funds were diverted to non-violent endeavors. Today we have universities which are well funded and engage in research, often handing out their gathered knowledge to the rest of humanity (James Webb space telescope can attest to this). Who know what we would have invented already if it wasn’t for the military taking most of the attention of historic societies?

You can’t really compare solid fuel rockets with liquid fueled rockets. And rockets fed by turbopumps (unlike the earlier pressure-fed models made by Goddard and others) are in a class of their own.

> rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction - that's just things I know from being in tech (and knowing some history). I'm sure if I was a chemist, materials scientist, engineer, or doctor I'd be able to name tons more from those fields.

Half of those inventions come from other nations who dont need to spend 800bn a year (or whatever it is now) + however much the CIA makes from selling crack.

> + however much the CIA makes from selling crack.

That gave me a good chuckle.

Also, just because the military did them first, does not mean we wouldn't have created them. We might even have more inventions if we had a dedicated R&D team for America.

Don't you have the start of something similar with DARPA?

Maybe that would be expanded and given a civilian role?

True, and DARPA does some pretty cool stuff. Civilian 'ARPA how awesome would that be.

I recently learned that US army supports breast cancer research.

Over 50% is contractors on bloated budgets.

> Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military research

Nobody knew at the time that Hubble was literally a KH-11 class telescope, but one pointed the other way. The mirror size and the ability to be carried in the shuttle was probably to get some synergies out of those two projects.

"Accessory to War" is a pretty deep take on this topic.

I figured that was the case for a lot of things we have developed, but it must surely be more efficient to not also have the military goals as part of the effort.

Actually, I think the best thing we can learn from the military would be how to organize and mobilize large numbers of people toward some goal. The same could be said for religion. Then it's down to choosing a good goal...

I've pondered what would happen if we could dedicate one weekend per month of sports to community improvement instead. Where I grew up, sports were a big part of life. Every weekend the many fields and venues were full of people working together (and competing). Just imagine if they could all be organized to put their energy (just one weekend per month) into goals that would benefit everyone in the area. Perhaps military command structures and communication processes could be of value here...

You have just discovered collectivism. Individualism sounds worse, but to my understanding is ultimately just an excess of enlightment, which is the better philosophy™.

I hope you're not thinking about forcing people into this - and if not, what's stopping you from just starting the initiative right now?

> I hope you're not thinking about forcing people into this

Of course not. Forcing people to volunteer is... not effective long term.

Anyway, I long since left that Texas city which gave me the idea. I know amateur and professional sporting happens all around, but I don't encounter it much (so I forgot about the idea until now). I'm onto other things, although I still think this is a good idea. I know some churches organize their members to do good community services periodically, so I don't think it's a stretch to imagine sporting communities to make a routine of doing the same.

Interesting. From brief googling, it sounds like there were similarities/synergies, but "literally a KH11" is going a bit far.

> Nobody knew at the time that Hubble was literally a KH-11 class telescope, but one pointed the other way. The mirror size and the ability to be carried in the shuttle was probably to get some synergies out of those two projects.

Along these lines, there's a lot of hearsay that the technology that enabled JWST's mirrors, sun shade, etc. to be folded up for launch and deployed once in space had already been developed for military satellites.

Yeah and the rockets that send the satellites are directly inherited from world war 2 designs

To be fair, many of the original rocketry enthusiasts (German Rocket Society) were interested in the concept because it could put man into space. It was co-opted by governments to apply the research to weapons. In essence the government was willing to fund their research. However, there were rocket scientists that wanted no part of it but they were coerced into it.

This sounds like the folks who say, "What if we stopped paying for NASA and spent that money on our citizens instead?"

I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it often lacks nuance/insight. Money spent on NASA does stay in our economy. It provides jobs, funds research, etc. There are pros and cons to doing it this way as opposed to giving it to our people directly.

    I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped 
    spending money on military and instead spent it on 

Money spent on the military is not removed from the economy. It stays in the economy.

Some of that money directly goes right back into science via taxes. Other bits of it fund companies that do both research and military development. Other bits of that money fund college educations for tomorrow's science-doers. Etc.

Great idea! US DOD budget: 700B. We only really need nukes to keep the peace and maintain our interests. Nukes cost 20B/yr to maintain (both stockpile and delivery methods). The rest of the military budget is a bunch of garbage whose availability and global deployment makes it more likely USA engages in needless conflicts. A nukes only military is so cheap and effective. USA could do a yearly nuclear readiness demo on July 4th, like detonating a ICBM on the moon or in space for the whole world to see.

> A nukes only military is so cheap and effective.

Also mindbogglingly dangerous. Do you really want the only response options to be: 1) nuke the world from orbit or 2) surrender, with no middle ground?

> detonating a ICBM on the moon or in space for the whole world to see

No. Outer space is not an American property. Please detonate it in your backyard.

The cost of the US Military is a feature, not a bug. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and provides training and education for their long-term well-being.

Is there a historical example of any military where a single weapon was successful? How would Vietnam have gone differently if the US was nuke-only? How do you defend your own territory with nukes? Seems easy to defeat.

How would a nuke only army be effective? Your going responded to 911 by just nukeing Afghanistan? Or by saying 911 was not worth any response?

Not every nuke needs to be a city destroyer. You could use tactical nukes instead of tanks and mass infantry for example. Maybe you have a few elite squads on the ground who basically just serve to mark targets for orbital ICBMs to quickly destroy. Wars would be over by the time the ICBMs are launched. You could identify key industrial sites in advance of the war and basically blow up any capability for a follow up response or armament buildup as soon as war were declared. With enough ICBMs you could overwhelm air defenses; maybe with a swarm approach you could get away with a lot of decoys that are just made of cheap inert material versus the air defenses that have to assume each decoy is active. People think an ICBM only army would just be a huge hammer, but really it would be best used like a robotic surgical scalpel.

I know you're not necessarily advocating for this strategy and just sharing that they're much more advanced / tactical weapons now, but this strikes me as too cavalier.

It might be true that we can create nukes which have minimal fallout and minimum impact area (I have no idea to be honest), but this ignores the broader consequences such a strategy would bring. Namely that you remove the taboo of using nukes and start to normalize it. It then becomes more justifiable for other countries to also use nuclear weapons, at which point escalation becomes ever more likely. Imagine the consequences if Russia were to use nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine. Frankly we need as large a stigma as humanly possible on the use of these weapons.

What would even be the consequences if Russia were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Maybe a lot, or maybe absolutely none depending how they are used. If they are used in a Nagasaki capacity then yeah, that would lead to repercussions, but you can do that with conventional arms too. See what the allies did to Dresden for instance, or the firebombing of Tokyo. The issue is not the weaponry, but the act of threatening civilians versus strictly military targets. If Russia used nuclear weaponry as they currently use their conventional missile weaponry in ukraine I'm not sure the international community would care more than they currently care about the war, in a world where the political taboo of using nukes did not exist.

With hindsight, either of those look like better options than what we ended up doing (20 years, 2 trillion dollars, nothing to show for it).

I agree the outcome of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could have been better. In fact I would even agree they were disastrous. But:

If we had nuked Afghanistan we (probably) would have kicked off WWIII.

If we had done nothing further attacks may have occurred.

Both of those seem at least worse than what actually happened.

imo, there's no possible world where not invading Afghanistan causes 2 trillion dollars of attacks. (especially because 9/11 had only very weak links to Afghanistan)

I think your post is sarcastic, given last sentence. But if not, or for readers who ...

> A nukes only military is so cheap and effective.

If it was effective, we'd see them in reality.

I feel like the only thing stopping it is political taboo. If the U.S. actually supplied tactical nukes for the bay of pigs invasion as planned I think we would see nuke only armies today. As it stands the only time it was used in combat was WWII and no one has ripped the bandaid off diplomatically speaking yet using them in another situation.

> If the U.S. actually supplied tactical nukes for the bay of pigs invasion as planned I think we would see nuke only armies today.

IMHO, we would see post-nuke armies... after all the nuclear wars destroyed the industrial capacity required to build more nukes.

with tactical nukes there would be no difference between nuke-only and regular militaries. You can dial down a nuke yield to be equivalent of a 2k lb HE bomb. Now you're right back to a regular military only, now, every bomb is a nuke instead of only a few.

A nice dream is to think what would happen when the budget of the environmental agencies would switch with the military globally. Imagine having 800 billion a year to fix things!

It's certainly a dream. It would require some type of worldwide disarmament agreement since any power that had a military could ostensibly bully the ones that did not (and just take what they wanted).

800bn just for the US, that is

More than everybody else combined.

Not that we get that much for the money: probably most of it is simple (wholly-legal!) graft, as with NASA's SLS rocket.

What we get for the money is a whole lot of aggressive expansionist wars, all over the world, that never happen. Unfortunately some still manage to slip through the net, like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but if the west generally didn't spend a whole ton on military preparation I believe we'd see an awful lot more of those sorts of conflicts everywhere. Here's a historical graph of deaths from warfare.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...

You can see that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, deaths per population from warfare dropped off a cliff. Unfortunately deterrence is hard to quantify because it's about making things not happen.

Unfortunately, the spending also provided a huge military comfortably capable of over-responses and misdirection in the context of small but dramatic threats.

A vast amount of US "defense" spending since 9/11 has been a "war on money" in the form of massive unending offensive plays against countries that had/have undesirable aspects, but that didn't declare war on the US.

We also get all sorts of aggressive wars and foreign interventions from the US and its allies. Iraq, Libya and Yemen come to mind.

When what you have is a hammer... but that isn't an argument for not having a hammer in your toolbox.

> Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military research

Like the Internet that you are using right now.

15 Core smart phone technologies with military origins [0]:

1. AI – Artificial intelligence

2. Cellular Communication Technology

3. Computers

4. CPU – Central Processing Units – Microprocessors

5. DRAM – Dynamic Random-Access Memory

6. DSP – Digital Signal Processing

7. GMR – Giant Magnetoresistance – Spintronics

8. GPS – Global Positioning Systems

9. HDD – Micro Hard Drive Storage or Hard Drive Disks

10. HTML Hypertext Markup Language and HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol

11. IC-Integrated Circuits

12. Internet

13. LCDs – Liquid-Crystal Displays

14. Li-ion – Lithium-Ion Batteries

15. Multi-Touch Screens

Probably a good time to reprise the fascinating Steve Blank presentation on "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" [1]

[0] https://www.techevaluate.com/your-cell-phone-was-born-in-the...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

HTML came out of CERN, not the military.

Absolutely. Tim Berners-Lee was an independent contractor to CERN in his original March 1989 proposal [1]. But CERN paid the bills. I believe the point that citation [0] (above) is making in this regard is that CERN has received significant funding from the US, and that HTML/HTTP was an enabling technology of the original darpanet. CERN has 23 (European), even more Non-Member States (including the USA) and states with Observer status (Japan and USA). The US funding for CERN historically has been from both The US Department of Energy and The National Science Foundation [2]. The US contributed $531 million just for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) CERN project alone [3].

[1] http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html

[2] https://united-states.cern/funding

[3] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.4.0488/full...

Sure, but that doesn't mean it would not be possible to develop such technologies without military research. There's nothing about people with guns that is necessary for communications research.

Having said that, I just posted across thread on why I think we still need the people with guns, so if that's the case we might as well take the incidental benefits where they come.

Saying we should eliminate the military is the geopolitical equivalent of rewriting your service from scratch. The military-industrial complex is the system we have and know. Another system might work but there is no reason to believe the costs of developing it would be less than fixing bugs in our current implementation.

Or say, didn't have a massive amount of wealth owned by the rich, who really don't do much. But then again, if wealth was better distributed, there'd be far more consumption, and that is generally bad for the environment.

But back to the point, I think napkin math for the military budget for one year is (if there was supply) solar and wind for the whole grid. It is close to a trillion dollars, and that is such a crazy number.

The Iraq War #2 was such a tragedy of wasted treasure. That is the budget for mitigation/heading off climate change. It was the right time, the right amount of money.

I don’t totally know how wealth distribution would fix this. It isn’t like Elon Musk is hoarding millions of used cars, food and medical supplies. If we distributed all his wealth it would basically just be flipping some bits in computers to make the average persons number bigger. How does that correlate to actual wealth?

Well if you taxed people like Elon sufficiently maybe we would be able to use that to afford everyone in the country food, medical supplies and care, and more robust public transport. That quality of life increase to the public is certainly an example of an increase in wealth. You go from having no food to having it, having no healthcare to being covered, having less options for mobility to having more. These are valuable things that are now in greater abundance for you, that by definition is an increase in wealth.

No I am saying if you take 100% of Elon's money and redistribute it that would really only free up the things Elon consumes but can no longer afford. We can't turn money (which is just numbers in a computer) into doctors and food, it is just a lever for incentivizing production.

What would happen if you gave everyone in the country money to get medical care but didn't increase the number of hospitals and doctors we have?

>And honestly, we should be spending $$$$ on food development research. We're going to need to know how to grow food in new ways soon, as the old ways have reached their limits. Food seems kind of important...

Eh, not really.

A whole lot of the world's agriculture is done far from optimally. Funding agriculture university programs in Africa with extension programs like the land grant universities in the US would do great things. Disseminating information, tools, and capital for "third world" farms is the best thing that can be done for global food supplies.

Being a bit selfish here, I'm talking about _my food_. And given what we've seen in the last few years involving supply chain disruptions (even the local ones in NL when the angry farmers try to block the grocery store distribution centers), it's clear to me that the best way to ensure food availability is to grow it locally.

Every region that is currently dependent upon remotely grown food must learn how to grow more of their food locally. Maybe these will be high efficiency vertical farms, or maybe something else. But "merely" improving the efficiency of farming half a world away isn't going to be enough. And further, our current "efficient" farming is unsustainable. Our high output methods are causing many negative effects, not the least of which is soil quality degredation. Our soils are near barren and require immense additives (fertilizers) to enable us to continue high yield farming. And returning to the supply chain topic, fertilizer availability is on that list.

I agree, decentralization of food production is critical to sustainable and reliable food production. Some places even have community compost centers where people bring their scraps and can get compost for their gardens.

A shift in growing crops more adapted to the local climate reality is also an important shift. A lot of places grow staple crops brought by colonizers centuries ago, which are ill suited to the local soil and require additional resources to grow, whereas less known types of grain and fruit/veg could be grown to produce higher yields with less effort and be more hardy in the area's temp/precipitation/soil.

Initial costs of setting up local food growth might seem exorbitant, but would bring a lot of long-term cost reduction for people.

Added bonus to this is reducing pollution caused by worldwide shipments of produce, and improving food taste as things grown nearby don't need to be harvested early and ripened in route, refrigerated, treated for pests.

Another thing that would be beneficial, and this is the idealist in me speaking, is giving people the empowerment to control their own food supply, boosting communities, giving people the means to have more autonomy over their basic needs so they're not reliant on a global market currently dealing with a variety of issues, mitigating the risk that food imported will be scarce or too expensive for families to feed their members.

> I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending money on military and instead spent it on research and science. [edit - perhaps this is misunderstood as me suggesting money spent on the telecope is wasted; quite the contrary, I'm arguing that we should be spending MORE on efforts like this!]

Stopped? Then you get invaded and there is no more space program? We live in a world and when you are a country capable if launching JWST you are also a country that needs defending from other humans/countries. I do agree with making defense less of a jobs program making middlemen criminally rich.

You know, even if we could stop defense spending as a whole I would say solving homelessness, health care and food security is a higher priority. But still, space programs should get their funding just not more than or taking away from helping your own suffering citizens.

I think the federal government competing in the private sector in certain industries makes sense. In this case charging for space based comms and launches and using that money to fund space research makes sense. That aside the money should come from research grants and funding academia is receiving already if they are the ones using it. Of course, instead of reducing defense spending, spending defense in space is better, it was an arms race with russia after all that landed people on the moon.

Every thread on JWST starts this flamewar.

Unfortunately we live in a world with countries such Russia so we have to invest in millitary too.

Or America. Matter of perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Invasions_by_the_Unit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I honestly didn't think I'd find that many Wikipedia pages listing the different "types" of thing America has been involved with. Wow.

We already more than outspend both russia and china on defense.

And that seems to not be enough as deterrence.

Ironically, many contractors for this telescope are in military industry.

Sadly, we can look at Europe to see what happens. You end up open to someone like Putin, looking to flatter their legacy.

We need to do things like Elon is doing with SpaceX to fundamentally change the economics of scientific efforts like JWST.

I think I disagree on food development research though. That money goes straight to Monsanto and Bill Gates on making copyrighted crops and pseudo-meat. How about we break up food production monopolies and spend our money figuring out how to have farmers compete. Put an end to subsidizing fuel crops. Support food diversity to avoid monoculture vulnerabilities (where a single disease can wipe out giant swaths of food sources). We need less "progress" on agriculture, and more restoration to healthy foods.

Research on food distribution, yes.

Research on fresh water supply, yes.

The old ways for growing food aren't currently being used. We don't rotate crops anymore. We do stupid things like growing almonds in water-poor regions. We need to get back to growing food for people to eat, instead of for giant monopolies to "optimize."