-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
New Chinese shipboard ASW helicopter
- Thread starter Llarry
- Start date
Hanssen died a week or two ago. It didn't really make much of a splash in the news, especially after Ted Kaczynski died.
good riddance
I’m pretty sure if Ike knew how this phrase would have been abused by the left after he died, he’d have been first in line to kick the abusers square in the balls. Frankly, if anyone uses the phrase “military-industrial complex” unironically anymore, I instantly stop listening. It has no meaning anymore outside internet wankery.
Inconveniently to some people, we (i.e. the liberal democratic West) still need a robust defense industrial base. And if the Russo-Ukrainian War and the ongoing tensions over Taiwan haven’t driven this home in your mind, you’re not paying enough attention.
If there’s a foul to be called, it’s on the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations forcing defense contractor consolidation over the so-called “peace dividend,” and stifling competition for defense contracts.
So you're saying Ike would kick me in the balls, huh?
Agreed we need the robust defense industrial base (eyeroll that you use this as a more appropriate wording of industry military complex) right now. I'm not advocating for its demise. Yet. But a perpetual growth defense model is not good for anybody except the defense industry. Its probably not happening anytime soon, but I would hope at least the next generations could innovate towards a year-on-year shrinking budget. Not because no one cares about national defense because everyone is now weak liberals, but they figure out how to stop the bad guys with less and less, instead of more and more. Call it utopian/idealist, but that should be the target, and the opposite not an automatic assumption forever and ever.
I realize the DOD both stokes (for necessity of actual defense needs as well as keeping factories open for future needs, jobs, etc.) the fire, but they also keep it in check by limiting who and what the companies can sell their defense widgets to.
"Hey are they bad guys? No, not yet. Well, sell them the shittier model just in case they become bad guys because we might need you to make us better stuff later."
The last two posts are worthy of a complex in-depth discussion that only starts with basic economics. Let me just point out that getting a job done with less, or squeezing out efficiencies that should make a job less costly rarely happens anywhere in society. Our cars are far more efficient and cost more every year. Your home airconditioner is vastly more efficient than a 1970 model, yet costs more. Our military currently is doing more with less, yet the budget grows, in part because the technology that allows us to do more with less is costly, and it isn't all price gouging by the contractors.
Now, if you are talking about being smarter about avoiding conflict, that is diplomacy, and if you are talking about staying out of conflict by re-prioritizing our interests, that is politics. Either way. Good luck changing human nature.
Hold on a sec. I think you're a bit off base in arguing we actively helped them modernize, unless you're counting lend lease aid to Russia which I'd say is a somewhat different animal. Did they incorporate technology we and other nations developed into their own growth? Absolutely. As has happened across human history and not limited to defense. The Japanese in the 19th century were actually pretty amazing at taking the best from around the world and then growing it organically at home- from beer to railroads they sought out the 'best' elsewhere in the world and built versions at home.
Pretty remarkable the shift that occurred there following Perry 'opening' Japan into being an advanced regional power in just a few decades. Fascinating chunk of history for nerds out there - the circumstances of how the Japanese dealt with the West and vice versa in the late 1800s absolutely laid the groundwork for their aggression later.
On China I think you're a lot closer to right - we thought that by effectively gifting them the engine for global growth in the last fifty years that they'd say thanks by chucking out Communism and becoming friendly capitalists. This proved to be... not correct. That said, I don't think you can suggest that their comprehensive approach to economic/industrial espionage equates to us 'helping build up' their military. My two cents.
The sci fi nerd optimist in me likes to think we will shift our perpetual growth economic model to outer space. Mining and colonization.
Random8145
Registered User
No, I mean we actively helped the Soviets industrialize during the 1920s. American companies were eager for business and the Soviets were fascinated with American industrial production, wanting to create an improved, socialist variant. So under contract, companies and engineers helped design numerous Soviet factories, power plants, dams, and so forth, and sold the Soviets huge quantities of machine tools, tractors, trucks, and other modern equipment, and trained the Soviets to use them.
We willingly gave them enormous quantities of technology and knowledge which they used to build up their economy and industry and hence from that, their military.
Random8145
Registered User
Remember that what we call the "military-industrial complex" didn't really come into existence until the Cold War, when it was realized that a permanent defense industrial base and permanent large and strong military would now be needed.
Random8145
Registered User
Other than if a group of people is very lucky, throughout history defense has always been a costly part of life and/or the overall economy. In tribal times, the tribe had to manufacture weapons and train for war, because if they didn't other tribes that did would come and murder or enslave them. The Greek city-states, it was the same thing. The one I think Athenian statesman actively lied to the citizens (well sort of) in order to get the money to build a navy as he knew the Persians would eventually attack again (which they did, involving the stand at Thermopylae everyone knows as the "300 Spartans"). Throughout history it's either been a large chunk of the tribe or village or city-state having to contribute or in modern industrial economies a large portion of the national budget having to go towards defense. It's an old economics problem known as the guns and butter problem.
Also as wink pointed out, we do try and do more with less, but that costs a lot to develop the technology to make it so. And it's especially hard when the enemy has a numerical advantage combined with decent tech (like China seems to), and ALSO manages to keep stealing the more advanced tech we develop. During the Cold War, some remarked that in funding our own defense budget, we also were funding the Soviets', because they'd constantly manage to steal our tech, and then we'd have to spend more to develop more advanced tech, rinse and repeat.
In the 1980s, the Soviets had more subs than we did, but theirs were noisy, so the Navy viewed us as having a qualitative advantage. Fewer subs, probably more costly though. But then the Japanese sold the Soviets the computer numerical control machine tools needed to manufacture quiet propulsion systems, so the Navy decided to create a super-duper sub, the Seawolf. Only it cost about $20 billion a piece.
I love that when I read the title of this thread, before even opening it, I knew that I would be looking at a picture of a Chinese SH-60. And they have apparently even subdivided them into their own Romeo and Sierra communities. Reminds me of the pics taken of their carrier ready rooms. Winnebago jackets, Bic pens, LSO jerseys and croakies. You can't make this shit up....
…they should have done a little bit more “spying” on that topic.
What do you even call a knock off of a zombie S-3?
I’d say “a Bud Light can,” but people seem to be yelling about that a lot these days.