'Flying gun' reminds me of TIKAD, a drone-mounted assault rifle developed at Duke University. Israel is buying/has bought them for 'anti-terrorist operations':
Here is the Ziyan Blowfish A3 shooting a paint target against a hill with a small caliber automatic weapon. The manufacturer claims autonomous operation without admitting autonomous targeting. Shooting anyone it finds, in other words.
I remember at some point seeing an interview with someone that was involved with the design of the A-10 Warthog and he described it as something like a gun wrapped in an airplane. Unsurprisingly this site mentions attempts to replace the A-10 Warthogs big gun.
this smells like an attempt to update the CAS concept; kind of like an AC-130 that's more survivable or expendable with less risk to a live pilot.
That being said, I'd have expected them to make something like a Reaper with guns instead of AGMs. I'm just not sure why they are describing it as a "missile with guns" vs a "drone with guns"
Given the rough form factor they describe (I think a hellfire when I read it), I'd expect they're looking to be able to quickly deploy multiple of these things to do targeted killing or automated area denial in firefights w/o having to risk a pilot or a whole plane.
Like a swarm of mini warthogs firing 5.56 or 7.62.
There was another one of a rifle shooting at balloons from a drone, but I can't find the video for that.
Not quite a 'missile' but the basics seem to be relatively straightforward and within the budget of hobbyists, the DARPA program is mostly about scaling it up and dealing with the recoil and mechanical and thermal stresses associated with mobile launch platforms. Drones are severely weight constrained so getting this to a level where it is combat ready is harder than it might seem. I'm personally not sad about that, I think that any 'remote kill' capability comes with its own special set of problems and that we are very far from being ready to handle that responsibly, witness the current assassination programs.
Not to knock on hobbyists doing cool projects, but to me "missile" means "at least supersonic if not hypersonic".
I guess the article is light on details there, but I get the impression that this is intended to be a way to send a very fast (and so hard to shoot down) missile at a target with the ability to fire multiple smaller missiles or simply to fire bullets at enemy aircraft from a vastly closer range where it's onboard sensor suite will be far more effective against enemy aircraft countermeasures.
Or simply to provide much more active countermeasures against AA sites shooting the missile down.
Something incredibly fast that uses a computer to rapidly analyze and respond to sensor data to respond with a variety of lethal options sounds terrifying and I don't especially want it to exist. But I can see the appeal of having a new missile that stands a much better chance of striking a target to make actual global adversaries think thrice.
The new cold war... yet we still have citizens without food security or health care... priorities I guess.
Missile usually just means something shot at something else. It doesn't need its own propulsion and it does not need its own guidance system. A stone from a slingshot counts as a missile by the normal definition.
I'm aware of the etymology. Mitto, mittere. In modern ordnance context, missile = guided, rocket = unguided. Even though both use rocket motors (and here they usually say motor rather than engine).
A missile is something that flies through the air with the intention of hitting and damaging a target. The exact mechanism of propulsion is orthogonal to the purpose. A stone from a sling is a missile, as is a pulse-jet-powered drone packed with explosives, as is a quadcopter with a kilo of C4 strapped to it.
1 why are not the army involved as well as 2/3s of the roles are army related
2 Why an expendable missile and not a reusable gun armed drone in a loyal wingman role or a parasite drone that can be launched from a mother ship or from a truck / avf back in the 50's they had the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin parasite fighter
You could have a disposable sprint motor to get into into position quickly
Finally what calibre, type of round and capacity are required
I know this is still a weapon but it's surprising the lengths we go to in order to minimize civilian suffering.
I just got finished watching The World at War series. During WWII there was routinely air raids that would kill 20,000+ people. Tokyo firebombing killed 100,000+
War is still bad but I'm glad I don't have to live thru that.
I don't think it's quite so altruistic. Militaries are systematically moving to smaller, more precise munitions across the board. If they're smaller and smarter you need A)fewer of them for a given mission and B)can carry more of them, therefore being able to complete more missions, on any given launch platform. A B-29 can carry max 20,000lbs of ordinance but with no precision so at most it can kill one factory or depot. Hypothetically, the same aircraft carrying a max load of GBU-53/B StormBreaker small diameter smart bombs would be able to destroy a hundred factories and installations in one flight.
Killing people is also a good way to create more enemies, which a.) you then have to dispatch and b.) have a chance of killing you. There are very large second-order efficiencies to creating weapons that only kill those who pose an immediate threat to you and minimize collateral damage. Remember that the military operates as an extension of larger foreign policy goals, and it's far more efficient to never create an enemy in the first place than it is to get rid of them.
(Sometimes I wish world leaders would realize this, but a lot of foreign policy isn't actually about advancing a nation's strategic goals, it's about providing an outlet for aggressive tribal emotions that are usually suppressed within the population.)
Minimizing casualties is typically the first priority in any combat engagement.
People like to point at very publicised situations where things went horribly wrong or there were major breakdowns in good order that led to those considerations being ignored. However if you dig deeper there will typically be major investigations (which is BTW how these Incidents come out usually) and severe punishments, not to mention all the follow on effects for the rest of the force like increased training in Laws of armed conflict etc...
The cynic/realist would say its not minimizing casualties but minimizing negative effects of casualties.
That nowadays is necessary to win a war because society doesn’t accept as much suffering from both own and enemy forces and civilians as it used to. The USA got out of Vietnam because of lack of home support and decreased morale of its soldiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Collapsing_U.S._mo...), not because of the enemy’s strength.
BTW makes me wonder when people will start watching the documentary on the Syrian civil war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war
(it's live on the middle east section of the news)
How about we harden our infrastructure first? You can't use this against hackers taking down your power grid. This won't stop misinformation campaigns on social media.
In the 20th century DARPA might be right. But two decades into the 21st century? It sounds pointless.
DARPA is hardening our infrastructure. They just did a bunch of anti drone experiments in San Diego it was in the news. There were even some UFO articles written about it.
While not having infastructure needlessly vulnerable to hacking is generally known as not being a goddamned idiot be very cautious of "misinformation campaign" protection beyond critical thinking and auditability as a norm.
It is one thing to somehow get any news agency who even tries to be reputable to sign their stories, the government to sign their official publications, and people to expect anything claiming to be them to actually prove it.
Allowing anyone the authority to enforce "blocking misinformation" for "national security" is a concept tailor made for a use. My Lai and Tiananmen Square would be "misinformation" while antivaxxer bullshit and "if you vote with a relative in jail you will be arrested" style misinformation would go untouched because it would be born an instrument to be abused for power.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Except that scientists working on DARPA programs have also produced some technologies that have proven phenomenally useful to civilians such as the internet, computer mice, GPS, Siri, etc.
Still a relevant quote that makes you think about the costs of war, especially when you think about the fact that the person who said it being one of the planners for- and also talked to the soldiers who would participate in- D-Day.
NASA put people on the moon and brought them back. They could have designed, launched, and operated GPS like they do Hubble and other satellites. It’s well within their expertise.
We don’t need to accept massive DoD funding of violent undertakings that end up killing millions simply for the meager benefits we get as a side effect sometimes.
They could develop GPS, but they didn't and wouldn't.
The U.S. military commissioned and deployed GPS to configure the clocks and weapons systems required to hold off the hostile and ignorant powers of the world.
Well until we create a more peaceful world we will not have the opportunity to find out.
Also I don’t think Russia, China, Iran, etc, are any less ignorant than the US. Differently ignorant, maybe ;). Which is not to give those countries a pass.
You're assuming here that the U.S. military is the genesis of human violence, but the era of American military hegemony has been the most peaceful in human history.
America has used the promise of force to uphold a status quo that most people can get on board with, one which doesn't really warrant revolt. The CCP probably will not accomplish anything like that, if we are ever so damned that they become the hegemon; in that case we might as well have just surrendered to the Nazis.
I always have a problem with this quote because I personally acknowledge a bit of the keynesian argument regarding military spending, that much of it is returned back into the economy and is put to the productive uses listed in that quote.(I'm not saying that's a good reason to raise it)
Also, if you are going to mention the opportunity cost of defense spending, then I think we should also carefully assess the opportunity cost of not securing the world with american power and returning to a world without a dominant unipolar power, as a multipolar world seems much more prone to conflict.
> We all come from the same family, at the end of the day.
Of course, but I'll be damned if I let my brother sock my mother in the nose just because he's family. Not that I'm walking around looking for a fight. On the contrary.
And if it were my specific responsibility to protect people, it would be foolish for me to become out of shape, unequipped, sloppy, and inattentive. Staying prepared has "costs", of course. That doesn't mean every minute of cardio, training session, or watchful minute is a waste. It would be if someone else already fulfilled that responsibility or if I were egregiously overpreparing or mispreparing somehow.
Of course it isn't. Replacing a broken window with a new window is almost entirely a waste, perhaps other than making sure the window industry remains marginally more viable.
Much military spending has direct value as surplus goods, scientific advancement, humanitarian support, and patronage for domestic skilled industry. Maybe those benefits, and others, do not justify the expenditures in all cases, but it's far from a "perfect" waste of economic output.
The benefit of a broken window is that you do not have to argue that it has to be replaced. If you have a superior replacement window then this can actually be a net positive but most things just haven't changed that much. It wouldn't surprise me though if war is the only thing that can counteract awful zoning policies.
John Maynard Keynes made his case at the heart of the Great Depression. At that time it was true -- it was a period of deflation and high unemployment, so what money people had they were hoarding because they expected its value to increase. People were willing to work but no one would pay to hire them.
Having the government hire people to dig holes and fill them back in, in that specific context, was better than them being unemployed. Doing useless work wasn't productive, but neither was being unemployed, so that's a wash. Meanwhile having money in their pockets meant they had money to spend, and then they paid other people to do things that actually were useful. A net gain against the status quo.
But even then it was a false dichotomy, and now it's even worse. The false dichotomy is that the options are to do nothing or to pay people to do something useless. There is a third option -- pay them to something useful. That's better than either of the other two.
Today it's even worse, because unemployment is very low. People already have jobs. They're already getting paid, and most of the work they're doing is already productive. In that context make-work jobs don't just not help, they actively reduce productivity, because people get paid either way and you're just changing what kind of work they do. If they would have been doing productive work and you convert them to digging holes and filling them back in, you're making things worse, not better.
It's frustrating to me that we would rather pay people to dig holes and refill them than just provide a UBI so they can spend more time actually enjoying their lives.
> The assumption you make is that people extract more value from their lives from receiving "free" money than "earning" it from doing "useless" work
But of course they do, because if they didn't then they could just take the "free" money and still volunteer to do the useless work. Maybe some people like digging holes and filling them back in -- it's good exercise.
But anybody who can think of anything more productive to do with their time is then given the option to choose that instead.
>But of course they do, because if they didn't then they could just take the "free" money and still volunteer to do the useless work. Maybe some people like digging holes and filling them back in -- it's good exercise.
This is happening in practice. There are lots of popular jobs where people will put up with anything to get the job. Game developers routinely have "crunch time" but they don't quit as a result. Some even think it's a bonus because they get to spend more time at their dream job.
I think most people who say "it would be rational to pay people to dig holes and refill them" say it only as a prelude to saying "and therefore, paying people to build useful infrastructure is surely even more efficient"
In the 1700s UK and Ireland, many rich people thought charity in the form of hand-outs was a bad idea and reward without labour was bad for character [1]. So some rich people who wanted to help the poor would hire them for things like building 'follies', extravagant decorative buildings and roads to nowhere. Having famine victims earn food with hard labour went about as well as you would imagine.
Yes, OR instead of rich self-righteous sociopaths, you could let the government help out (gasp, grimace, faint, yes, I know right?) and then instead of "follies" you end up with great public works like our National Park system [1] or electricity for entire regions of the country [2] (regions that now hate the Federal govt more than anyone).
The digging holes thing was a facetious example in a textbook where he said burying cash in old mines would theoretically stimulate the economy. He didn't mean that the government should literally do that and the government never did. It was intended to provoke thinking about how mandating jobs during times of extraordinarily high unemployment can stimulate a depressed economy. People who hate the government on principle more than they like facts then purposefully conflate that pedagogical example with real government initiatives of the time like the CCC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps) which was one of the most celebrated government programs of all time that built and repaired tons of important civic infrastructure mainly in our national park system, which became arguably the greatest on earth, saved thousands from poverty and involuntary idleness, helped stimulate the depressed economy, and gave desparate, disenfranchised young men a sense of patriotic purpose.
But this just becomes "zomg govt so dumb pays ppl to dig holes lol, communism fail".
>But even then it was a false dichotomy, and now it's even worse. The false dichotomy is that the options are to do nothing or to pay people to do something useless. There is a third option -- pay them to something useful. That's better than either of the other two.
If you think there was a false dichotomy then you never understood Keynesian gold digging. Just read Keynes' quote:
>If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again… the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
The emphasis should be on the last sentence. Do you really think nobody thought of something as simple as "pay them to do something useful"? The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare). Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts. Again, just read Keynes' quote
>It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly 'wasteful' forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict 'business' principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions."
Gold digging has always been about finding a solution that people will vote for. It has never been about the most efficient way of restarting an economy.
> The emphasis should be on the last sentence. Do you really think nobody thought of something as simple as "pay them to do something useful"?
The issue is that it's claiming to be a reductio ad absurdum -- paying people to do useless things is an improvement, therefore paying them to do something is useful is even better than that.
But the first claim only holds under conditions of high unemployment, and if it doesn't hold then it doesn't prove the second one. Paying people to do "something useful" is better than having them not get paid and not do anything useful, but that doesn't prove that it's better than what they would be doing in the alternative, which could be getting paid the same to do something even better.
Proving that your something is better than nothing doesn't get you out of proving that it's better than the status quo, unless the status quo is people doing nothing. And even then it's only if people are actually doing nothing, not just not having a job and using them time to learn a new skill or start a business that doesn't produce revenue yet or do volunteer work etc.
> The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare).
The only thing governments should spend money on is in the category of welfare. Having roads or subways paid for with taxes and not fares is "welfare" because it's not profitable. But "welfare" can increase efficiency because the existence of transportation benefits everyone (even indirect users), and the expense is dominated by fixed costs which makes charging usage fees inefficiently discourage use of a resource that has been paid for regardless, and fare collection itself is a major cost center that can be eliminated when they're funded through taxes.
If something is profitable then you don't need the government to do it because private companies will do it anyway. The only way out of that is to start classifying welfare as investment when its positive externalities exceed its costs. But by that point the only categories you're left with is "profit" and "waste", because welfare programs that cost more than the benefits they produce shouldn't exist either.
> Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts.
If your town wanted to install municipal fiber, Comcast would whinge about it so hard you could hear it from space, which is the primary reason it hasn't already happened in most places. But just because hiring people to build a fiber network would be productive and we can't do that as a result of lobbying, doesn't prove that hiring people to do some less useful thing would also be productive.
The digging holes thing was a facetious example in a textbook where he said burying cash in old mines would theoretically stimulate the economy. He didn't mean that the government should literally do that and the government never did. It was intended to provoke thinking about how mandating jobs during times of extraordinarily high unemployment can stimulate a depressed economy. People who hate the government on principle more than they like facts then purposefully conflate that pedagogical example with real government initiatives of the time like the CCC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps) which was one of the most celebrated government programs of all time that built and repaired tons of important civic infrastructure mainly in our national park system, which became arguably the greatest on earth, saved thousands from poverty and involuntary idleness, helped stimulate the depressed economy, and gave desparate, disenfranchised young men a sense of patriotic purpose.
But this just becomes "zomg govt so dumb pays ppl to dig holes lol, communism fail".
"I think we should also carefully assess the opportunity cost of not securing the world with american power and returning to a world without a dominant unipolar power, as a multipolar world seems much more prone to conflict."
There is nothing good about unipolar power. If ran unchecked it becomes an fucking arm twisting thug ready to go to conflict every time it does not like something. Luckily while most powerful at the moment it is far from being unipolar (not for the lack of trying).
Loads of research finds its way back into civilian hands and does good for society, and it's hard to know what'll be useful and what won't. But churning out the same old missiles and tanks that we'll never use is money that could've been better invested in infrastructure or pretty much anything else.
Also, if you are going to mention the opportunity cost of defense spending, then I think we should also carefully assess the opportunity cost of not securing the world with american power and returning to a world without a dominant unipolar power, as a multipolar world seems much more prone to conflict.
America had military teams operating in 134 different countries in 2014[1]. Does that really indicates a unipolar power that's less prone to conflict?
Hate to be a debbie downer and disagree with Ike but the money spent on arms and warfare would not neccesarily be spent on noble things if that spending didn't happen. In a democracy, the money would instead go to whatever cause swing voters and the influential king-maker class think is important. In the US these items tend to be causes of the middle class,not causes of the poor. The middle class,with their very basic needs met tends to focus on their fears and trendy boogy-man of the times instead of the plight of their poor neighbors.
I don’t think Eisenhower was saying the money would necessarily go to those things. He was saying they could have, and that each of these weapons purchases represents a lost opportunity, a choice not made.
The most noble class in the US right now is "our tropps". Most people don't consider combat soldiers to be murderers.
War is what happens when two or more groups of people find no other way to resolve a conflict other than by killong the other party's people and destroying their belongings until they give in.
Murder is intentional killing of a person outside of acceptable and legal contexts (such as self defense).
How long until people realize that their beloved politicians are warmongers and tax evaders helps people by avoiding money being diverted from society to be wasted by the evil military-industrial complex creating war and destruction or, at least to parasites working on different levels of the state?
Despite what the state apparatus sell people, most taxation money doesn't come back as services for society, but goes to the pocket of parasites or end up being used in the destruction of society.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadhttps://www.armyrecognition.com/weapons_defence_industry_mil...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDGqc0FrXZg&feature=youtu.be...
According to the US secretary of defense these are being exported from China now.
That being said, I'd have expected them to make something like a Reaper with guns instead of AGMs. I'm just not sure why they are describing it as a "missile with guns" vs a "drone with guns"
Like a swarm of mini warthogs firing 5.56 or 7.62.
Of course you’d still need armor piercing, or maybe not if you could make a drone that would foam engine intakes or optics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI--wFfipvA
There was another one of a rifle shooting at balloons from a drone, but I can't find the video for that.
Not quite a 'missile' but the basics seem to be relatively straightforward and within the budget of hobbyists, the DARPA program is mostly about scaling it up and dealing with the recoil and mechanical and thermal stresses associated with mobile launch platforms. Drones are severely weight constrained so getting this to a level where it is combat ready is harder than it might seem. I'm personally not sad about that, I think that any 'remote kill' capability comes with its own special set of problems and that we are very far from being ready to handle that responsibly, witness the current assassination programs.
I guess the article is light on details there, but I get the impression that this is intended to be a way to send a very fast (and so hard to shoot down) missile at a target with the ability to fire multiple smaller missiles or simply to fire bullets at enemy aircraft from a vastly closer range where it's onboard sensor suite will be far more effective against enemy aircraft countermeasures.
Or simply to provide much more active countermeasures against AA sites shooting the missile down.
Something incredibly fast that uses a computer to rapidly analyze and respond to sensor data to respond with a variety of lethal options sounds terrifying and I don't especially want it to exist. But I can see the appeal of having a new missile that stands a much better chance of striking a target to make actual global adversaries think thrice.
The new cold war... yet we still have citizens without food security or health care... priorities I guess.
i.e. rocket plus some fins vs wings?
2 Why an expendable missile and not a reusable gun armed drone in a loyal wingman role or a parasite drone that can be launched from a mother ship or from a truck / avf back in the 50's they had the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin parasite fighter
You could have a disposable sprint motor to get into into position quickly
Finally what calibre, type of round and capacity are required
I just got finished watching The World at War series. During WWII there was routinely air raids that would kill 20,000+ people. Tokyo firebombing killed 100,000+
War is still bad but I'm glad I don't have to live thru that.
(Sometimes I wish world leaders would realize this, but a lot of foreign policy isn't actually about advancing a nation's strategic goals, it's about providing an outlet for aggressive tribal emotions that are usually suppressed within the population.)
People like to point at very publicised situations where things went horribly wrong or there were major breakdowns in good order that led to those considerations being ignored. However if you dig deeper there will typically be major investigations (which is BTW how these Incidents come out usually) and severe punishments, not to mention all the follow on effects for the rest of the force like increased training in Laws of armed conflict etc...
That nowadays is necessary to win a war because society doesn’t accept as much suffering from both own and enemy forces and civilians as it used to. The USA got out of Vietnam because of lack of home support and decreased morale of its soldiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Collapsing_U.S._mo...), not because of the enemy’s strength.
I try cutting slack here or on Reddit but most of the time when these topics come up you can tell nobody has any clue what war is like.
(people still live thru that)
In the 20th century DARPA might be right. But two decades into the 21st century? It sounds pointless.
It is one thing to somehow get any news agency who even tries to be reputable to sign their stories, the government to sign their official publications, and people to expect anything claiming to be them to actually prove it.
Allowing anyone the authority to enforce "blocking misinformation" for "national security" is a concept tailor made for a use. My Lai and Tiananmen Square would be "misinformation" while antivaxxer bullshit and "if you vote with a relative in jail you will be arrested" style misinformation would go untouched because it would be born an instrument to be abused for power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11
loaded with
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frangible_bullet
Idk much about the field, but it seems close to as-light-as-possible.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
We don’t need to accept massive DoD funding of violent undertakings that end up killing millions simply for the meager benefits we get as a side effect sometimes.
The U.S. military commissioned and deployed GPS to configure the clocks and weapons systems required to hold off the hostile and ignorant powers of the world.
Also I don’t think Russia, China, Iran, etc, are any less ignorant than the US. Differently ignorant, maybe ;). Which is not to give those countries a pass.
America has used the promise of force to uphold a status quo that most people can get on board with, one which doesn't really warrant revolt. The CCP probably will not accomplish anything like that, if we are ever so damned that they become the hegemon; in that case we might as well have just surrendered to the Nazis.
Also, if you are going to mention the opportunity cost of defense spending, then I think we should also carefully assess the opportunity cost of not securing the world with american power and returning to a world without a dominant unipolar power, as a multipolar world seems much more prone to conflict.
Put simply, war is never good, it damages even the victors, and, the necessity of being prepared for it should not blind us to its costs.
We all come from the same family, at the end of the day. Albeit a particularly contentious one ;).
Of course, but I'll be damned if I let my brother sock my mother in the nose just because he's family. Not that I'm walking around looking for a fight. On the contrary.
And if it were my specific responsibility to protect people, it would be foolish for me to become out of shape, unequipped, sloppy, and inattentive. Staying prepared has "costs", of course. That doesn't mean every minute of cardio, training session, or watchful minute is a waste. It would be if someone else already fulfilled that responsibility or if I were egregiously overpreparing or mispreparing somehow.
Much military spending has direct value as surplus goods, scientific advancement, humanitarian support, and patronage for domestic skilled industry. Maybe those benefits, and others, do not justify the expenditures in all cases, but it's far from a "perfect" waste of economic output.
Having the government hire people to dig holes and fill them back in, in that specific context, was better than them being unemployed. Doing useless work wasn't productive, but neither was being unemployed, so that's a wash. Meanwhile having money in their pockets meant they had money to spend, and then they paid other people to do things that actually were useful. A net gain against the status quo.
But even then it was a false dichotomy, and now it's even worse. The false dichotomy is that the options are to do nothing or to pay people to do something useless. There is a third option -- pay them to something useful. That's better than either of the other two.
Today it's even worse, because unemployment is very low. People already have jobs. They're already getting paid, and most of the work they're doing is already productive. In that context make-work jobs don't just not help, they actively reduce productivity, because people get paid either way and you're just changing what kind of work they do. If they would have been doing productive work and you convert them to digging holes and filling them back in, you're making things worse, not better.
But of course they do, because if they didn't then they could just take the "free" money and still volunteer to do the useless work. Maybe some people like digging holes and filling them back in -- it's good exercise.
But anybody who can think of anything more productive to do with their time is then given the option to choose that instead.
This is happening in practice. There are lots of popular jobs where people will put up with anything to get the job. Game developers routinely have "crunch time" but they don't quit as a result. Some even think it's a bonus because they get to spend more time at their dream job.
In the 1700s UK and Ireland, many rich people thought charity in the form of hand-outs was a bad idea and reward without labour was bad for character [1]. So some rich people who wanted to help the poor would hire them for things like building 'follies', extravagant decorative buildings and roads to nowhere. Having famine victims earn food with hard labour went about as well as you would imagine.
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/irelands-famine-follie...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
But this just becomes "zomg govt so dumb pays ppl to dig holes lol, communism fail".
If you think there was a false dichotomy then you never understood Keynesian gold digging. Just read Keynes' quote:
>If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again… the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
The emphasis should be on the last sentence. Do you really think nobody thought of something as simple as "pay them to do something useful"? The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare). Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts. Again, just read Keynes' quote
>It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly 'wasteful' forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict 'business' principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions."
Gold digging has always been about finding a solution that people will vote for. It has never been about the most efficient way of restarting an economy.
The issue is that it's claiming to be a reductio ad absurdum -- paying people to do useless things is an improvement, therefore paying them to do something is useful is even better than that.
But the first claim only holds under conditions of high unemployment, and if it doesn't hold then it doesn't prove the second one. Paying people to do "something useful" is better than having them not get paid and not do anything useful, but that doesn't prove that it's better than what they would be doing in the alternative, which could be getting paid the same to do something even better.
Proving that your something is better than nothing doesn't get you out of proving that it's better than the status quo, unless the status quo is people doing nothing. And even then it's only if people are actually doing nothing, not just not having a job and using them time to learn a new skill or start a business that doesn't produce revenue yet or do volunteer work etc.
> The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare).
The only thing governments should spend money on is in the category of welfare. Having roads or subways paid for with taxes and not fares is "welfare" because it's not profitable. But "welfare" can increase efficiency because the existence of transportation benefits everyone (even indirect users), and the expense is dominated by fixed costs which makes charging usage fees inefficiently discourage use of a resource that has been paid for regardless, and fare collection itself is a major cost center that can be eliminated when they're funded through taxes.
If something is profitable then you don't need the government to do it because private companies will do it anyway. The only way out of that is to start classifying welfare as investment when its positive externalities exceed its costs. But by that point the only categories you're left with is "profit" and "waste", because welfare programs that cost more than the benefits they produce shouldn't exist either.
> Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts.
If your town wanted to install municipal fiber, Comcast would whinge about it so hard you could hear it from space, which is the primary reason it hasn't already happened in most places. But just because hiring people to build a fiber network would be productive and we can't do that as a result of lobbying, doesn't prove that hiring people to do some less useful thing would also be productive.
But this just becomes "zomg govt so dumb pays ppl to dig holes lol, communism fail".
There is nothing good about unipolar power. If ran unchecked it becomes an fucking arm twisting thug ready to go to conflict every time it does not like something. Luckily while most powerful at the moment it is far from being unipolar (not for the lack of trying).
Loads of research finds its way back into civilian hands and does good for society, and it's hard to know what'll be useful and what won't. But churning out the same old missiles and tanks that we'll never use is money that could've been better invested in infrastructure or pretty much anything else.
America had military teams operating in 134 different countries in 2014[1]. Does that really indicates a unipolar power that's less prone to conflict?
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/us-now-involved-134-w...
War is what happens when two or more groups of people find no other way to resolve a conflict other than by killong the other party's people and destroying their belongings until they give in.
Murder is intentional killing of a person outside of acceptable and legal contexts (such as self defense).
Despite what the state apparatus sell people, most taxation money doesn't come back as services for society, but goes to the pocket of parasites or end up being used in the destruction of society.
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
"DARPA Wants Millions to Design an Unmanned 'Flying Gun' Under Its New Gunslinger, which will then be tested on your family, you stupid shit"