Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Why is the US military budget so large?
Posts
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
What makes you think the Russians won't sell their next generation craft as an export version? Given that you mention Iran having MiGs, where do you think they got them? Russia is always looking for hard currency and Putin has been pushing for new military techs during his entire time in power.
This is a difficult thing to put a pin on. After all we do want defense contractors who understand the industry. Putting a time requirement puts an X year lag on the quality of information the lobbiests have.
I'm confused what you're asking, but yes I think recently discharged members should be able to work with defense contractors in a non-lobbying capacity, for two reasons
1) Their knowledge can be put to directly good use, and they'll make good money for that knowledge
2) Practically every major company in the world is a defense contractor nowadays. Coca-Cola and Mars, for example, has defense contracts
I know a bunch who get hired on for marketing gigs after being in the command structure for bases with large contractor footprints.
It's not that they're hiring lobbyists per se, the problem at times is they're using the jobs as an eventual payoff for throwing them business. It's nearly impossible to prove however, and laws stopping it would also maul trained military engineers who go on to get research and development gigs making the next generations of their technologies legitimately.
The GAO is supposed to keep this under control, and they tend to do a decent job at it. The problem is they're Sloooooooooooooow about it. But if you do something illegal to scam the government, the GAO will eventually hunt you down. Who was it they busted for charging thousands of dollars shipping for 2-3 nails and shit?
Going by this argument we should be able to scale down military expenditure as parts of it should be paying for itself. Is there any stats on how much money the military actually brings in (not necessarily from R&D alone) - I'm not saying that the military should be profitable, but I think this argument comes up a lot in regards to funding NASA and it generally ends up that there are a lot better ways to spend the money if its just for research, and if it weren't that NASA and the military actually provided some other function in addition to this you wouldn't fund their R&D in to the same extent.
If you want to learn a lot about the pentagon, and how fucking stupid is, and learn a lot about airfcraft design in the process, pick up a copy of Boyd.
The thing with contractors is they come with a lot of overhead. Your company still has to pay your benefits, pay all the admin staff that send you a pay check, pay the people who supervise you back at the company, etc. All told, contractors are significantly cheaper for the government than hiring an employee. That $107/hr is a bargain.
So can they advise the lobbiests? How is that really any different?
Well, I dunno
I mean, when you got a 3 million-strong military it isn't cheap to, for example, feed, clothe, and shelter all the motherfuckers, not to mention health insurance, etc etc etc
I imagine just operational upkeep is a very significant portion of defense spending
$179 billion for operations and maintance. That doesn't include pay and benefits or procurement.
1) We're trying not to kill innocent civilians. If that wasn't a concern, we'd have totally rocked that country long ago. Of course, we'd be just as bad as Saddam, then.
2) Most of our military technology is designed to fight a massive war against an army, rather than an urban guerrilla war against resistance fighters.
3) We're at a point technologically where offensive military technology is far more efficient and cheaper than defensive military technology.
Number three has been an ongoing concern pretty much forever. First, we invented clubs, which was an offensive technology that made an attacker have an advantage over a defender. Then, we invented hides, which could absorb blows from clubs. Then, we started throwing rocks, which could hit from a long way away, giving the attackers the advantage again. Then it was swords and longbows, giving attackers the advantage. Then the fortified castle and plate armor which, combined with longbows, gave the defenders the advantage. Then crossbows, guns, etc. and the defenders haven't had the advantage since. The most recent major development was the MIRV, which just enhanced the attacker's advantage that much more. I mean, really, right now, to build a vehicle with bulletproof windows, thick side-panel armor, etc. takes tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. A vehicle that can be blown through by a shaped charge you can create with a few hundred dollars and some very basic, cheap explosives. You can buy twenty-thousand-dollar body armor, which still isn't going to entirely protect you from a two-hundred-dollar AK-47, and most definitely won't from a five-hundred-dollar sniper rifle, or the few hundred dollars someone is willing to spend on an antipersonnel IED.
A big place we need to look at for cutting military expenses is our nuclear deterrent. It's not the Cold War anymore. Even if it were the Cold War, we'd still have way too many nukes. We can cut down on our strategic subs, our silos, and our plane-dropped nukes by a whole shit-ton and still have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Disarmament will initially be expensive, but it will be a long-term investment in that we're not paying to guard and maintain the missiles we've disarmed anymore. I'm thinking disarming 70% of our nuclear missiles should be about right. It still gives us a far larger arsenal than anyone else in the world, while getting rid of a lot of weaponry we don't need.
It's not perfect, but it's vastly better than our current system and just making all members of the military unable to work for military contractors is a terrible, terrible idea
Wha? It's not just the superpowers that are achieving parity. India, Pakistan, pretty much any country that can afford to by jets from the Russians and have the engineers to develop jamming packages targeted at our technology. You don't need a stealth fighter if you can jam all the frequencies our missiles use.
Long term surveillance and maintenance of key components here is pretty expensive. You can't just put them in a pile.
Can you put them in a power plant?
So um, is there some reason those screws cost $5 a pop? Are they special screws? (I'm being serious.)
But without the military's political backing, that amount of money would never make it to R&D to begin with. For example, companies working in the development of prosthetic limbs would find it much harder to get funding without the military's political muscle. People simply react to civilians missing limbs the same as they do to soldiers who get a leg blown off. It ends up being a huge chunk of science (internet, microwave, radar, satellites, cellphones, GPS, etc.) that would have otherwise had to have been privately funded, and there aren't too many endowments around pumping out $500 billion a year.
Plus you get the benefit of companies knowing that a technology is already proven viable from its military service. And the volume on military contracts forces manufacturers to develop mass production techniques which lowers the costs of those goods when they reach the civilian market. It's why you can get FLIR on a BMW for $2k instead of $20k.
They are non-standard, this is a regular feature on millitary tech. Denmark bought some hardware off the US and we pay out the ass for maintenance because replacement parts (and screws) are only produced in the US.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
If you want to get rid of an aircraft, I think the best option is the B-2. They cost individually ten times what an F-22 costs (which is already a lot), and their stealth technology is already outdated. Their payload is relatively small, and the advanced penetration missions that they were really designed for can be handled by modern stealth fighters (i.e. the F-22) or ballistic and/or cruise missiles, depending on the target. We just retired the F-117 for similar reasons (i.e. obviated by newer, cheaper stealth technology on the F-22).
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
You can't go down to Home and B-52 Depot and buy a box of screws. Every part has to be specially machined from spec, and that includes the screws.
You'd have to admit though, that Home and B-52 Depot would be a pretty awesome place to shop.
Well you can't pile it. And I think its cheapest to cycle the stuff through constantly, since it requires some upkeep. Also its way too pure and the wrong metal for most power plants. Also its pretty expensive to build a facility to put the waste in to watch after it goes through the plant. Also, no one has built one anyway.
No, you can't. No more than you could take left-over rocket fuel and use it in you minivan.
It's actually the same problem that Nate Silver wrote about on 538 today in relation to Wall Street: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/two-birds-one-stone-regulation-and.html
It's a system that feeds on itself. The gov't uses contractors for lots of shit they do. They pay these contractors way more than they would pay internal people to do shit. Hence, anyone worth anything gets out of the gov't as fast as possible and goes to work for a contractor, doing maybe even the same exact thing they did while a gov't employee, except now it costs the gov't 10 times as much.
As in a lot of their reserves practice self defense in a field and receive no formal military training kind of crap.
Yeah you're right.
This is all true but you omitted that we're deployed all over the fucking globe serving as both deterrent, police force and army for hire. We have 737 foreign bases and almost 300,000 personnel deployed outside of the US, that includes foreign contractors.
For some of this we're compensated, but it doesn't make up for the overall expenses.
Putting aside the emotional aspect (which shouldn't be put aside lightly) the cost to train a soldier is between $35,000 to $50,000 depending on what specializations they have. Spending the money on body armor reduces the number of soldiers that have to be replaced. If the emotional argument doesn't sway you, then view it as protecting an investment.
Well, the body armor the average soldier wears doesn't cost $20K. With plates I'd be surprised if it tops $5K, and IIRC the last time I signed for my shit the vest itself (which still stop shrapnel and handgun rounds) only runs like $1700.
Also whenever you talk about the cost of protecting soldiers you have to consider the cost of losing them. Which is a pretty big chunk of change, considering all the benefits that go to the families and the cost of training a replacement.
I was mistaken regarding the cost, though. A B-2 actually costs closer to five times what an F-22 costs.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise