Is the Military Industrial Complex the biggest Welfare Queen in the USA?

Waste of valuable weeks, by the sounds of it.

Well G.W.Bush thankfully learnt all about the Vietnam war by reading books watching movies drinking alcohol. Good thing he knew a lot about war before the US launched two romantic military adventures !
Remember the lessons of Vietnam, 9-11 Afghanistan, Iraq Benghazi !
 
Well G.W.Bush thankfully learnt all about the Vietnam war by reading books watching movies drinking alcohol. Good thing he knew a lot about war before the US launched two romantic military adventures !
Remember the lessons of Vietnam, 9-11 Afghanistan, Iraq Benghazi !
While it's certainly not a good thing to have leaders making suboptimal decisions, I would be very interested to know what facile lessons you distilled from all of these conflicts that the United States military (an institution which has devoted a considerable effort to divining any possible data relevant to success in war from every war in history, even those in which it has not directly participated) has missed.

And why these lessons are not, in their own turn, negated by either countervailing historical lessons or recontextualization.
 
Do you think they learned "don't support the wrong side in a civil war" from Vietnam, "don't provoke terrorism by over-staying our welcome in countries which clearly do not want our military present" from 9/11, "don't pick corrupt drug dealers to run the government" from Afghanistan, and "don't invade the wrong country", as well as "the surge didn't work" from Iraq contrary to what so many from the far right claim?
 
Do you think they learned "don't support the wrong side in a civil war" from Vietnam, "don't provoke terrorism by over-staying our welcome in countries which clearly do not want our military present" from 9/11, "don't pick corrupt drug dealers to run the government" from Afghanistan, and "don't invade the wrong country", as well as "the surge didn't work" from Iraq contrary to what so many from the far right claim?
So your response to my criticism of the practice of drawing facile, superficial, decontextualized "lessons" from certain historical events - which furthermore ignores that one might draw directly contradictory conclusions from other events - is to restate those very same lessons?

I mean, some of these aren't even up to the standard of the idiot Santayana-ites, who at least say things that are supposed to be more helpful than "don't make wrong decisions".
 
"Don't continue to incessantly make the very same wrong decisions" would actually be a wonderful start to helping to resolve our chronically inept foreign policy. But at least we are still perceived as being more positively influential than China.

 
What happened to this being a trivial matter? You'd think learning at least three trades in a matter of weeks (for trivial effort!) would be a practical use of your time.

What are you even talking about? I learn lots of stuff all the time, medieval laws aren't in the set of things I'd ever consider learning.
 
Patroklos is right. It's not as simple as you guys joke.

If the US wants to maintain a native proficiency in naval nuclear propulsion, we must continue to invest in the engineering and personell required.

This is a small fraction of the money spent on defense. It's a good value.

Nuclear power is an under utilized resource, and anyone who is worried about carbon emissions should read up on it.
That goes for just about any field of expertise. You can store information on how something is done or built but the associated experience of those who work on such projects is invaluable and very easily lost.
 
Without completely derailing this thread, nuclear power is currently a costly joke other than for a few limited applications. But nuclear-powered submarines is certainly one of them.

Besides, that technology will hardly be lost even if we decide to no longer build some for a period. It doesn't take long at all to properly train people to maintain and operate them, and the engineering is now so well known that there is no chance whatsoever that it will somehow become forgotten. There is nothing magical or difficult to comprehend about nuclear power, much less how to construct those vessels.

This is just more fear mongering and paranoia reminiscent of what was stated after the Apollo Program was shut down. It didn't mean a complete end of missiles and rockets or their research and development. It simply meant that tens of thousands of people were suddenly out of jobs. They found their particular specialties were in extremely limited demand so they went into fields a bit different, at least until the shuttle program ramped up.
 
This discussion has been entertaining. Tell a right-winger about some poor woman getting a free phone through welfare and they are up in arms. Tell them that the Military Industrial Complex is a recipient of corporate welfare entitlement and they rush in to defend it.

Let's see. The woman getting the phone might be costing a few hundred per year. The M.I.C is costing hundreds of billions per year. :crazyeye:

Well, one is welfare by definition and one simply isn't. Actual dollar amount doesn't really pertain to the definition itself. :confused:
 
Without completely derailing this thread, nuclear power is currently a costly joke other than for a few limited applications. But nuclear-powered submarines is certainly one of them.

Besides, that technology will hardly be lost even if we decide to no longer build some for a period. It doesn't take long at all to properly train people to maintain and operate them, and the engineering is now so well known that there is no chance whatsoever that it will somehow become forgotten. There is nothing magical or difficult to comprehend about nuclear power, much less how to construct those vessels.

This is just more fear mongering and paranoia reminiscent of what was stated after the Apollo Program was shut down. It didn't mean a complete end of missiles and rockets or their research and development. It simply meant that tens of thousands of people were suddenly out of jobs. They found their particular specialties were in extremely limited demand so they went into fields a bit different, at least until the shuttle program ramped up.

Even if this weren't the case, it would simply be indicative of the current workers failing at their jobs. (As a knowledge worker, part of your job is to document everything appropriately in order to make yourself replaceable.)
 
Well, one is welfare by definition and one simply isn't. Actual dollar amount doesn't really pertain to the definition itself. :confused:

At least welfare is mentioned in the Constitution. Still don't understand why helping people help themselves is something our society shouldn't be actively encouraging...
 
At least welfare is mentioned in the Constitution. Still don't understand why helping people help themselves is something our society shouldn't be actively encouraging...

I think some people would rather that we build weapons for killing poor people overseas that doing something that would help the poor here. Why unwanted equipment buying is less wasteful than something like food stamps is beyond my ability to understand.
 

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