Military spending vs societal benefits

[Loren Pechtel]

Considering our "strong military" roundly loses every war it starts, or at best brings them to a lengthy and expensive stalemate from which we must eventually withdraw with our tail between our legs once again, isn't that throwing good money after bad?

E.g. Afghanistan wasn't lost because of our military, but because of politicians. No clear objective, overly restrictive rules of engagement.

Afghanistan was lost because it was an inherently unwinnable war. You can't win a war against an insurgent force with an untouchable source of backing.

You can... it's just not pretty. And a sizable portion of both our political machine and our citizenry have an aversion to the means necessary to win. Not saying they're wrong in that view, just saying that it wasn't "inherently unwinnable". It was unwinnable when we handcuff our wrist to our ankles so that we're being humane and compassionate toward an enemy who does not show us that same respect.

The Taliban were funded/armed by Pakistan. What we were supposed to do, hope we could kill their bombs with a pre-emptive strike??

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So how does any of that help anyone in America? I can see how paying for world security might help Europe live more peaceful since they are close to those neighbors. But America is on the other side of the world.

Trump is right. Its not fair that all of Europe should get free national healthcare while American's pay with all our taxes to support everyone else with free military safety and security!

After WW2 the US was rich enough to give charity. We aren't anymore.

It's not right that they are freeloading.

However, not spending the money is worse than spending the money.

Understand that Trump is a useful idiot doing Moscow's bidding.

 

[bilby]

I think it's because a multiway Prisoners' Dilemma is vastly more complicated and difficult to find a way out of than our old two-way game with the Soviets. If we and Russia disarm too much that just makes China more powerful.

There's also the issue of cheating. Do countries actually tell the truth about their nuclear arsenals? There's not much doubt about the big stuff--we know their silos, we know their silos, we know their boomers, they know ours. We even have a pretty good idea on bomber counts. Inspection treaties can confirm compliance. But what about things like cruise missiles? There is no functional difference between a conventionally-armed cruise missile and a nuclear-armed one. And some missiles are built for variable payloads (do you want to hit one hard target or do you want to hit an area of soft targets?), what's to stop a country from having bombs in storage that can quickly be placed onto "conventional" missile frames?

How would that help any nation? Nuclear weapons are a deterrent - nobody would use one in the modern world, because they know full well that to do so would be suicidal.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Speaking of WW2, we're lucky that pesky war over there never made it to our mainland shores.

If the US had not been involved at all, it still would never have made it to our shores.

1) It did make it to our shores! Pearl Harbor was a pre-emptive strike to try to destroy our military power in the Pacific, and it was only the fog of war that kept them from succeeding.

2) Had we stayed out of the war we wouldn't have the bomb. But Hitler likely would have.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Are you expecting the US to die, or become too old to work, or to lose her income due to redundancy or offshoring, or to run away from its creditors?

I'm expecting the US to lose reserve currency status and then resulting in a dollar crises. Ask our creditors how much their holdings are worth after that happens. Then ask the social security recipients how much their benefit is worth.

The goldbugs would have you believe that. It's going to fall. It's always going to fall.

 

[bilby]

Had we stayed out of the war we wouldn't have the bomb. But Hitler likely would have.

So would the British. Probably before Hitler did. Had Tube Alloys not been merged with the Manhattan Project, and instead been pursued by the MoD, the British would likely have had a bomb no later than 1947; Germany might have gotten one by the 1950s, though that seems unlikley given the poor state if their research as uncovered in 1945 with the fall of the Nazi regime.

Without the D-Day landings, Germany would likely still have been defeated by the Soviets before they developed a nuclear weapon. The British might have had one before the European war ended in that scenario, as likely it would have dragged on somewhat longer. Germany probably wouldn't have had one in time to avoid defeat, even so.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yeah, Japan didn't really give enough credence to the size of our Navy or our willingness to just dominate the Pacific ocean the hard way.

Had Japan pressed the attack home on Hawaii they would have won. And with Hawaii down we would have basically no ability to project power in the Pacific. Fleets can't operate too far from friendly ports--and we have none between the US and Hawaii. Retaking Hawaii would have been nearly impossible and we would have been basically powerless in the Pacific.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, Japan didn't really give enough credence to the size of our Navy or our willingness to just dominate the Pacific ocean the hard way.

Had Japan pressed the attack home on Hawaii they would have won. And with Hawaii down we would have basically no ability to project power in the Pacific. Fleets can't operate too far from friendly ports--and we have none between the US and Hawaii. Retaking Hawaii would have been nearly impossible and we would have been basically powerless in the Pacific.

The US Navy could have island hopped Northwards from Australia, rather than Westwards from Hawaii. General MacArthur had his base in Brisbane for two and a half years between 1942 and 1944.

One benefit of fighting a World War is that you have allies in convenient places, that you can rely on to let you use their port facilities.

It wouldn't have been as easy to get materiel from CONUS to the staging point(s), but then, it's not exactly easy to get materiel from CONUS to Hawaii, much less Guam or Iwo Jima. I reckon the US Navy could have done it, handily enough. Probably would have taken longer, but then, Japan was going backwards wrt ships and materiel from 1943 onwards, while the US was outproducing the rest of the world.

 

[Emily Lake]

It isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. It is what has ahppened in every military campaign in recorded history, including the specific war you are claiming would have been "won" had we escalated it further. If your views on military policy and effectiveness aren't based on reality, what good are they? If we pushed out into the Aghan countryside to blow up every single house with terrorists in it, that would be placing even more soldiers in long term postings in hostile environments with minimal oversight, exactly the conditions that are known to result in incidents like those cited.

Is it your view that the only reason the Allies won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping Axis soldiers?

No but only someone who is willfully blind fails to acknowledge that with every single war comes rape, disease, famine, starvation, the deaths of noncombatants including elderly, disabled, children, pregnant women, more.

Every single additional day of armed combat includes all of these things.

If war only encompassed the deaths and injuries of the armed combatants, that would be evil enough. But it doesn’t. It never does.

Yeah, I haven't suggested that it never happens.

On the other hand, I very strongly object to Poli's assumption that military victories can only be achieved by the victors being barbaric rapists that torture everyone with zeal.

Seriously - do you think Israelis are raping and brutalizing Palestinians with the same degree that Hamas does? Do you think that American troops engaged in anywhere near the same amount of rape, torture, beheading, and other barbaric behavior as the Taliban?

Poli's framing creates a false dichotomy where one can only ever resort to the worst kind of uninhibited savagery or lose - one cannot win without becoming an unrepentant villain. It's a stupid assumption and a bad argument.

I think that it is inevitable that even if by some miraculous change in human nature and the reality of being in combat for months to years at a time so that no sexual assaults happened during war, we would still see enormous loss of life among non-combatants and civilians, including the elderly, women and children and the disabled. Some directly as a result of armed violence and some because of destruction and re-distribution of food supplies, medical care and suppli s, drinking water and more.

I think it is a fantasy to imagine that this will not continue to happen, just as injured, sometimes permanently and severely disabled soldiers will remain among us in any armed conflict.

War is evil. Sometimes it is inevitable and perhaps even necessary to stop a greater evil but I think we must acknowledge the death and destruction, the raping and pillaging, the disease and famine that accompanied all war. And decide it’s enough. No more.

That didn't answer my questions, it sidestepped them completely.

 

[Emily Lake]

It isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. It is what has ahppened in every military campaign in recorded history, including the specific war you are claiming would have been "won" had we escalated it further. If your views on military policy and effectiveness aren't based on reality, what good are they? If we pushed out into the Aghan countryside to blow up every single house with terrorists in it, that would be placing even more soldiers in long term postings in hostile environments with minimal oversight, exactly the conditions that are known to result in incidents like those cited.

Is it your view that the only reason the Allies won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping Axis soldiers?

No. However, torture and rape occurred on massive scales during both of those conflicts. Demonstrably and beyond any measure of reasonable doubt. This became an inevitable outcome the moment mobilization began.

You keep being very non-specific about who is doing the torture and rape. "It occurred on massive scales" - perhaps... but were the tortures and rapes being committed by both sides at the same rates? I rather doubt it. I'm rather of the opinion that the Nazi's did a fuck-ton more torturing than the Allies did.

"Axis" and "Allies" were terms only used in the Second World War, by the way. The principal alliances in the Great War were the Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

I don't particularly care about trying to maintain two different sets of nomenclature for the two wars, when everyone clearly understand what the divisions represent. All it does is add more words for no additional meaning.

Tell that to Japan.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean as a response to what I said to Poli.

Are you concerned that the government of Japan is monitoring our discussion and is going to be deeply offended that I haven't made a distinction between WW1 and WW2 even though that distinction is of zero direct relevance to the discussion?

 

[Emily Lake]

If patriotism is so bad, then wouldn't one also have to accept that hating on people and deriding them for their place of birth is also self-evidently evil?

Yes, of course. And it is.

Nice to know you accept yourself as self-evidently evil, I suppose.

 

[Emily Lake]

You keep being very non-specific about who is doing the torture and rape. "It occurred on massive scales" - perhaps... but were the tortures and rapes being committed by both sides at the same rates?

So, what, it's a rape contest? Grow up.

On the other hand, I very strongly object to Poli's assumption that military victories can only be achieved by the victors being barbaric rapists that torture everyone with zeal.

No. Wars result in atrocities. Both "victors" and "losers" engage in those atrocities. I don't know what points you think you're winning by saying "yeah, well, the other guys raped way more women than we did". The victims don't care about the whose tally board they're on, I can assure you.

It still makes your position silly. YOU are the one implying that wars can only be won by engaging in barbarism and torture. It's your false premise, just go ahead and own it.

I don't particularly care about trying to maintain two different sets of nomenclature for the two wars, when everyone clearly understand what the divisions represent. All it does is add more words for no additional meaning.

How quickly we went from "you can't possibly know as much about miltary matters as I do, you're not married to any soldiers!" to "Who really cares who the belligerents in the largest wars in human history were, or what they called themselves"? Your dismissal of simple and obvious facts about warfare is really eroding the convincing qualities of your claims to tactical expertise on more complex matters, here.

Come to think of it, I'm starting to wonder whether you even know who exactly we were fighting in Afghanistan, either. Is it just "the terrorists", in your comprehension of the matter? It seems to be all you know to call them. You must be really confused as to why the war took so long... It was just some random terrorists hiding in caves, right? Why didn't we just bomb the caves with some super big bombs? Show those bad guys what for?

Did you not read anything that I posted on how we engaged in that conflict, and the overall approach that the US took?

If you'd like to go ahead and give me a lesson on the military and social strategies employed, and the reasons for those approaches, please go ahead and do so. I would really love to hear your rendition of it, rather than just throwing out ad homs. So by all means, please educate me. Go on.

 

[Emily Lake]

I think it's because a multiway Prisoners' Dilemma is vastly more complicated and difficult to find a way out of than our old two-way game with the Soviets. If we and Russia disarm too much that just makes China more powerful.

There's also the issue of cheating. Do countries actually tell the truth about their nuclear arsenals? There's not much doubt about the big stuff--we know their silos, we know their silos, we know their boomers, they know ours. We even have a pretty good idea on bomber counts. Inspection treaties can confirm compliance. But what about things like cruise missiles? There is no functional difference between a conventionally-armed cruise missile and a nuclear-armed one. And some missiles are built for variable payloads (do you want to hit one hard target or do you want to hit an area of soft targets?), what's to stop a country from having bombs in storage that can quickly be placed onto "conventional" missile frames?

So... we are now fully aware that Russia has been lying about their capabilities for decades. We've also been lying about our capabilities. The problem is that we thought Russia was lying the same way we were lying... and they were not.

 

[Emily Lake]

So how does any of that help anyone in America? I can see how paying for world security might help Europe live more peaceful since they are close to those neighbors. But America is on the other side of the world.

Trump is right. Its not fair that all of Europe should get free national healthcare while American's pay with all our taxes to support everyone else with free military safety and security!

After WW2 the US was rich enough to give charity. We aren't anymore.

It's not right that they are freeloading.

However, not spending the money is worse than spending the money.

Meh. It's perhaps not equitable that they're freeloading. On the other hand... it does give the US a rather privileged negotiating position. Plus the fact that most of our allies are arming their militaries with vehicles, planes, and armaments that they buy from the US I don't know how to tease it out from the high-level data that we get on line, but at least some of what we as a country spend on military equipment is in the form of building equipment that we then sell to other countries.

 

[bilby]

It isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. It is what has ahppened in every military campaign in recorded history, including the specific war you are claiming would have been "won" had we escalated it further. If your views on military policy and effectiveness aren't based on reality, what good are they? If we pushed out into the Aghan countryside to blow up every single house with terrorists in it, that would be placing even more soldiers in long term postings in hostile environments with minimal oversight, exactly the conditions that are known to result in incidents like those cited.

Is it your view that the only reason the Allies won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping Axis soldiers?

No. However, torture and rape occurred on massive scales during both of those conflicts. Demonstrably and beyond any measure of reasonable doubt. This became an inevitable outcome the moment mobilization began.

You keep being very non-specific about who is doing the torture and rape. "It occurred on massive scales" - perhaps... but were the tortures and rapes being committed by both sides at the same rates? I rather doubt it. I'm rather of the opinion that the Nazi's did a fuck-ton more torturing than the Allies did.

"Axis" and "Allies" were terms only used in the Second World War, by the way. The principal alliances in the Great War were the Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

I don't particularly care about trying to maintain two different sets of nomenclature for the two wars, when everyone clearly understand what the divisions represent. All it does is add more words for no additional meaning.

Tell that to Japan.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean as a response to what I said to Poli.

Are you concerned that the government of Japan is monitoring our discussion and is going to be deeply offended that I haven't made a distinction between WW1 and WW2 even though that distinction is of zero direct relevance to the discussion?

Are you not aware that Japan fought in WWI on the same side as the USA?

Does that make Japan one of "the Allies"?

You said:

the Allies won WW1 and WW2

Japan won one, and lost the other.

Russia was on the same side as the eventual victors of WWI, but lost. Massively.

Your comment shows an astonishing ignorance of the wars on which you are commenting.

 

[bilby]

If patriotism is so bad, then wouldn't one also have to accept that hating on people and deriding them for their place of birth is also self-evidently evil?

Yes, of course. And it is.

Nice to know you accept yourself as self-evidently evil, I suppose.

I am a human being; It comes with the territory.

 

[Emily Lake]

Yeah, Japan didn't really give enough credence to the size of our Navy or our willingness to just dominate the Pacific ocean the hard way.

Had Japan pressed the attack home on Hawaii they would have won. And with Hawaii down we would have basically no ability to project power in the Pacific. Fleets can't operate too far from friendly ports--and we have none between the US and Hawaii. Retaking Hawaii would have been nearly impossible and we would have been basically powerless in the Pacific.

The US Navy could have island hopped Northwards from Australia, rather than Westwards from Hawaii. General MacArthur had his base in Brisbane for two and a half years between 1942 and 1944.

One benefit of fighting a World War is that you have allies in convenient places, that you can rely on to let you use their port facilities.

It wouldn't have been as easy to get materiel from CONUS to the staging point(s), but then, it's not exactly easy to get materiel from CONUS to Hawaii, much less Guam or Iwo Jima. I reckon the US Navy could have done it, handily enough. Probably would have taken longer, but then, Japan was going backwards wrt ships and materiel from 1943 onwards, while the US was outproducing the rest of the world.

Wasn't a whole lot of US pacific dominance run out of Australia and the Philippines?

If we'd completely lost Hawaii... well, I don't think that would have resulted in a Japanese win. I suspect we'd have retaken HI no matter what because "don't touch our boats". But a direct crossing of the pacific wasn't our strategy anyway. IIRC, we didn't come in from the east or the north, we came at Japan largely from the south pacific, by way of many islands and atolls, as well as (as you say) strategically located allies.

 

[Emily Lake]

It isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. It is what has ahppened in every military campaign in recorded history, including the specific war you are claiming would have been "won" had we escalated it further. If your views on military policy and effectiveness aren't based on reality, what good are they? If we pushed out into the Aghan countryside to blow up every single house with terrorists in it, that would be placing even more soldiers in long term postings in hostile environments with minimal oversight, exactly the conditions that are known to result in incidents like those cited.

Is it your view that the only reason the Allies won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping Axis soldiers?

No. However, torture and rape occurred on massive scales during both of those conflicts. Demonstrably and beyond any measure of reasonable doubt. This became an inevitable outcome the moment mobilization began.

You keep being very non-specific about who is doing the torture and rape. "It occurred on massive scales" - perhaps... but were the tortures and rapes being committed by both sides at the same rates? I rather doubt it. I'm rather of the opinion that the Nazi's did a fuck-ton more torturing than the Allies did.

"Axis" and "Allies" were terms only used in the Second World War, by the way. The principal alliances in the Great War were the Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

I don't particularly care about trying to maintain two different sets of nomenclature for the two wars, when everyone clearly understand what the divisions represent. All it does is add more words for no additional meaning.

Tell that to Japan.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean as a response to what I said to Poli.

Are you concerned that the government of Japan is monitoring our discussion and is going to be deeply offended that I haven't made a distinction between WW1 and WW2 even though that distinction is of zero direct relevance to the discussion?

Are you not aware that Japan fought in WWI on the same side as the USA?

Does that make Japan one of "the Allies"?

You said:

the Allies won WW1 and WW2

Japan won one, and lost the other.

Russia was on the same side as the eventual victors of WWI, but lost. Massively.

Your comment shows an astonishing ignorance of the wars on which you are commenting.

I know that Japan was on our side in WW1. My retort to you is "Does that actually matter within the context of this discussion?" There are several other countries that were enemies in one and allies in the other. It's immaterial to the nature of the discussion.

Let's go back to my initial question, and I'll satisfy your quibble - maybe then we can get an answer rather than a trivial delving of nomenclature:

Is it your view that the only reason OUR ALLIES won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping OUR ENEMIES?

That was the actual meat of the question. That's what Poli has repeatedly sidestepped, and it's the core of his position. I made a comment that the US has the technology and the capability to have won in Afghanistan, but that it wouldn't have been "pretty" by which I meant t would have required a lot more aggressive targeting and very likely have necessitated more actions that would reasonably be called assassinations to accomplish. Poli, however, decided that it could only have been won by barbarically torturing, scalping, and raping civilians. Poli has taken the implied position that the only way wars can be won is if the victor outright engages in unrestrained horrors. I think Poli's position is wrong.

So how about an answer to the actual context?

 

[Emily Lake]

If patriotism is so bad, then wouldn't one also have to accept that hating on people and deriding them for their place of birth is also self-evidently evil?

Yes, of course. And it is.

Nice to know you accept yourself as self-evidently evil, I suppose.

I am a human being; It comes with the territory.

It comes with some fucked up religion.

Humans aren't self-evidently evil. Humans are animals, we're neither more nor less evil than any other critter on the planet.

 

[Toni]

It isn't something I invented out of whole cloth. It is what has ahppened in every military campaign in recorded history, including the specific war you are claiming would have been "won" had we escalated it further. If your views on military policy and effectiveness aren't based on reality, what good are they? If we pushed out into the Aghan countryside to blow up every single house with terrorists in it, that would be placing even more soldiers in long term postings in hostile environments with minimal oversight, exactly the conditions that are known to result in incidents like those cited.

Is it your view that the only reason the Allies won WW1 and WW2 was by brutally torturing and raping Axis soldiers?

No but only someone who is willfully blind fails to acknowledge that with every single war comes rape, disease, famine, starvation, the deaths of noncombatants including elderly, disabled, children, pregnant women, more.

Every single additional day of armed combat includes all of these things.

If war only encompassed the deaths and injuries of the armed combatants, that would be evil enough. But it doesn’t. It never does.

Yeah, I haven't suggested that it never happens.

On the other hand, I very strongly object to Poli's assumption that military victories can only be achieved by the victors being barbaric rapists that torture everyone with zeal.

Seriously - do you think Israelis are raping and brutalizing Palestinians with the same degree that Hamas does? Do you think that American troops engaged in anywhere near the same amount of rape, torture, beheading, and other barbaric behavior as the Taliban?

Poli's framing creates a false dichotomy where one can only ever resort to the worst kind of uninhibited savagery or lose - one cannot win without becoming an unrepentant villain. It's a stupid assumption and a bad argument.

I think that it is inevitable that even if by some miraculous change in human nature and the reality of being in combat for months to years at a time so that no sexual assaults happened during war, we would still see enormous loss of life among non-combatants and civilians, including the elderly, women and children and the disabled. Some directly as a result of armed violence and some because of destruction and re-distribution of food supplies, medical care and suppli s, drinking water and more.

I think it is a fantasy to imagine that this will not continue to happen, just as injured, sometimes permanently and severely disabled soldiers will remain among us in any armed conflict.

War is evil. Sometimes it is inevitable and perhaps even necessary to stop a greater evil but I think we must acknowledge the death and destruction, the raping and pillaging, the disease and famine that accompanied all war. And decide it’s enough. No more.

That didn't answer my questions, it sidestepped them completely.

The level of rape, torture, beheadings, etc. is unacceptable, no matter who is doing it or to whom they are doing it or why they are doing it. After a certain level of evil, it is just evil with no better, no worse. Evil is the complete description and requires no qualifier.