Should we stop providing humanitarian aid to Africa?

[Felch]

It's time to eliminate some of these redundant systems and standardize down to just a few.

You mean the F-35? It's a reality. Not deployed yet, I don't think, but it's nearly there. And it's all about standardization (variations exist with VTOL and other required specs). However, it is not a pure air superiority fighter. That's what the F-22 is for. It's there to shoot down enemy aircraft. And like I said, terrorists don't have planes. But basing your defense budget around the last war (Iraq, Afghanistan) will only end up hurting you in the next.

If we have such a an awesome air-superiority fighter that nobody wants to mess with us in the air, then it's done its job. By your standard, it's a waste. Luckily nobody cares what you think.

[Q Classic]

To compare the military has found crap loads of combat missions for the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18: http://www.f-16.net/news_article2283.html

The F/A-18 is a different beast than the F-22. The F-22 is not meant to land on a carrier, for instance.

But it's immaterial. Like I said earlier: part of the point of the F-22 is to have that biggest, most badass weapon so nobody wants to **** with us. By and large, it works for that: nobody wants to challenge the US in traditional, "symmetric" warfare.

Sounds like a unless jobs program to me abet a shiny pretty one. In any event it's time to kill this cash wasting hole in the ground.

So, in this time of economic slowdown, you're in favor of creating more unemployed?

Sure, the Marine Corp, the Navy, and the Air Force each all want bespoken planes built just for them and them alone but that is a waste of money. It's time to eliminate some of these redundant systems and standardize down to just a few.

That's why they're standardizing on the rather modular F-35. The F-22 is the Air Force's baby, and only the Air Force's.

[Dinner]

At the very least we shouldn't be buying more F-22. There are just to many other ways that money can be better used.

[Q Classic]

At the very least we shouldn't be buying more F-22. There are just to many other ways that money can be better used.

That's kinda a toothless statement, isn't it? It's like saying, "We shouldn't buy any more space shuttles. There are just too many other ways that money can be better used."

Or, more saliently, "We shouldn't continue our (mis)adventure in Mesopotamia..."

[Felch]

When they talk about the purchase price of these things (planes, ships, whatever) the per unit price includes the cost of R&D, which has already been spent. That's why the B-2 was costing us 2 billion dollars per plane - the money had already been spent getting the design right, and when you only build a couple dozen it's harder to spread that cost around. You might argue against throwing good money after bad, but really you're just not getting your money's worth if you don't buy a decent number of the planes. The DoD should focus on getting its money's worth, but the way to do that is to build the planes that have been developed, not scrapping a perfectly good system.

[David Floyd]

Wow. Oerdin's argument has been pretty much pwned by people smarter, more knowledgeable, and more experienced than myself. I don't even feel the need to respond to any of his points.

I will say this, however. The fact that the US spends money on defense in order to be prepared for war is a relatively new thing. After the Revolutionary War, military spending - especially naval spending - was cut so drastically that we were unprepared for the War of 1812. After the War of 1812, and on up to the Civil War, our military declined so drastically that, while we did defeat Mexico, we were not even close to ready to defeat the Confederacy - which, given better military preparedness by the United States, could have been put down much sooner. But we didn't learn after the Civil War, because the Spanish American War was in many ways fought with "ad hoc" formations - fleets and ground components formed by putting together units which in many cases had never operated together. We were lucky we were fighting Spain, and not England or Germany.

But we still didn't learn. When we were thrust into WW1, our army was structured essentially as a small force with basically no division sized formations, that was mainly good for policing the Western Hemisphere and the Philippines and not much else. Granted, our navy was in better shape, but our army was largely supplied with artillery, for example, by the French.

Following WW1, look at the state of the US military in the 1930s - in 1939, our army was smaller than Portugal's, and our navy, while perhaps impressive on paper, was shown to be structurally outdated when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor - although fortunately, we learned pretty quickly how to fight with marginally inferior equipment, and then build better equipment, especially in the aviation field. Our ground equipment proved adequate against the Germans, but only because we had more of it and constant air superiority.

It seems to me that had the United States maintained a large, modern military throughout it's history, then the deterrence factor could have prevented wars, or in the case where it did not, we would have been in a better position to fight those wars from outset. And guess what? Deterrence works in this area - witness 1945-1991, during which time not a single war was fought between superpowers, nor did ANY country (ie, the Soviet Union) attempt to start a war in Western Europe. However, even given historical precedent, we still apparently hadn't learned at the end of WW2, given the state of the US Army at the outset of the Korean War. Thankfully, things improved - and stayed that way - in the early 1950s.

Ultimately, it's cheaper to build a weapon you don't need, than to fail to have the necessary weapons when they are required.

[Arrian]

Surely there is a sweet spot we can aim at that leaves us prepared to defend ourselves but not spend the insane sums we currently do? I agree that we should avoid gutting our military such that it is incapable of power projection. But that seems like a false choice to me: who, exactly, is suggesting that?

As for deterrance post WW2... um, nukes might have had something to do with it.

-Arrian

[mrmitchell]

Support the JSF and other programs that seem like they're stuck in the Cold War. Not only are they deterrent but they represent an enormous amount of R&D and engineering. It's not like we're throwing money down a hole or building jet engines laced with gold. The military gets legitimate technological advancement out of the budget for these programs, and I hope they're expanded.

Oh and support humanitarian aid too. To cut it wouldn't be worth **** as a "symbolic move" since it accounts for under 1% of the deficit. You might as well say that ending ocean research or reducing school lunches is a symbolic move and I'm sure all three of them would make the deficit tremble in its freshly soiled britches. The truth is you would have never ended the deficit of the past few years without not invading Iraq or not bailing out the lagging or amoral parts of our economy.

[Ramo]

The marginal value of nonmilitary foreign aid with respect to a variety of metrics (national defense, national wealth, human welfare) is far, far, far larger than the marginal value of military force. Which one would expect, given that there's a factor of 20 or so separating the two forms of spending. A vast increase in aid to Africa is a no-brainer.

[molly bloom]

Deterrence works in this area - witness 1945-1991, during which time not a single war was fought between superpowers,

This is only strictly true if you discount all the wars in Africa, Asia and Central and South America fought by the proxies of the superpower blocs with arms and materiel supplied by their sponsors.

It's really astonishing to think that anyone can imagine the superpowers didn't take part in the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, nor in the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

C.I.A. involvement in the Angolan/Zairean theatres is well attested to, and Cuban troops fought in Angola inflicting a defeat on South African forces.

The notion that Africans (which ones in particular, one wonders...) are some homogeneous mass waiting for handouts from the West is grotesquely insulting, but the level of knowledge displayed so far about agricultural and climatic conditions in Africa and the type of social anthropology displayed-
'(Africans) breeding like rabbits'- is sadly pretty much par for the course.

Yes, there are basket cases- Zimbabwe springs to mind, as do some of the other kleptocracies. But ask yourselves who exactly was it who supplied arms to say, the failed state of Somalia ?

Or Sudan under Nimeiry, Ethiopia under Mengistu or Mobutu's Zaire ?

And which banks are happy to hold funds for the likes of Mobutu and Mugabe ?

What price ethical banking...

[David Floyd]

mrmitchell,

Oh and support humanitarian aid too. To cut it wouldn't be worth **** as a "symbolic move" since it accounts for under 1% of the deficit. You might as well say that ending ocean research or reducing school lunches is a symbolic move and I'm sure all three of them would make the deficit tremble in its freshly soiled britches. The truth is you would have never ended the deficit of the past few years without not invading Iraq or not bailing out the lagging or amoral parts of our economy.

Well, for a similarly insignificant amount of federal spending, look at the HUGE benefit the space program has had for us, in terms of science and technology. Cutting aid to Africa wouldn't help much with the deficit, but we could put the money to much better use, and gain a much greater ROI, if we dumped it into the space program. Of course, that's just one example - there are others, such as medical research.

molly bloom,

This is only strictly true if you discount all the wars in Africa, Asia and Central and South America fought by the proxies of the superpower blocs with arms and materiel supplied by their sponsors.

It's really astonishing to think that anyone can imagine the superpowers didn't take part in the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, nor in the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

C.I.A. involvement in the Angolan/Zairean theatres is well attested to, and Cuban troops fought in Angola inflicting a defeat on South African forces.

Yes...that's exactly my point. Rather than confronting each other directly, in a massive conventional and/or nuclear conflict on the European continent and every ocean in the world, the superpowers restricted themselves to proxy wars, and limited themselves in those proxy wars to avoid larger conflicts.

The notion that Africans (which ones in particular, one wonders...) are some homogeneous mass waiting for handouts from the West is grotesquely insulting, but the level of knowledge displayed so far about agricultural and climatic conditions in Africa and the type of social anthropology displayed-
'(Africans) breeding like rabbits'- is sadly pretty much par for the course.

Well, they ARE breeding like rabbits. Look at the nations with the highest birthrates in the world - you'll find that most of them exist in sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think that Africans are a homogeneous mass waiting for handouts - but I certainly DO think that of many of the African governments.

Yes, there are basket cases- Zimbabwe springs to mind, as do some of the other kleptocracies. But ask yourselves who exactly was it who supplied arms to say, the failed state of Somalia ?

Or Sudan under Nimeiry, Ethiopia under Mengistu or Mobutu's Zaire ?

And which banks are happy to hold funds for the likes of Mobutu and Mugabe ?

The Eastern Bloc supplied most of the arms, AFAIK, to those nations you mentioned - witness the huge numbers of AK-47s and obsolete MiGs in those nations even today.

The biggest example I can think of, of the West supplying arms to an African nation, was South Africa - which was emphatically not a basket case, and in many ways one of the bright spots on the continent (yes, apartheid was wrong). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem like the case any longer.