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This post is about my least favorite institution, the military industrial complex. I write this not as an outsider, but as a former employee of the industry. I spent 7.5 years in there, with 3 years at a production environment and 4.5 years at a development environment. These are some of my observations and opinions. 1. For discretionary spending, not counting Social Security and Medicare which are separate, this is the single biggest black hole for tax-dollars. While there may be a few programs out there like Raytheon's program to destroy ICBMs, the vast majority are excess. As an example, my first Defense Contractor employer, a smaller outfit in the Orlando area, was a $300,000,000+ a year business. It's main product, a laser rangefinder, was being stored in a warehouse in Virginia, never seeing any combat, training, or civilian use. 2. From an environmental and political standpoint, it was also troubling. There is at least a 2:1 ratio of people who consider themselves "conservative", but they're really extremely liberal on government spending, since, naturally, their salary and livelihood comes from government contracts. They're selectively conservative on some spending programs, which are comparatively small to what they spend, and pretty much reject any form of government spending that doesn't benefit them. On top of this, they thrive on global conflict. In the production environment I worked in, when layoffs were announced, some people got stressed and let their opinions out. One common theme I heard was a desire for a terrorist attack, war, or other conflict that would increase government demand for our products. 3. On a more personal note, the industry echoes Ike's warning of individual creativity being reduced to government contracting. Much engineering design work has been reduced down to using an allocated development budget to make a simplistic design. Tons of engineers are used solely to come up with requirements and low-cost system integration techniques. While it's understandable that military equipment should be reliable and simplistic, the vast amount of money spent on this has degraded professional engineering in a major employment industry. There is some impressive design work done in the industry, but it pales in comparison to other commercial companies and even other government science organizations and labs. This is just a glimpse at the insanity in the industry. At a higher level, there is a lot of corruption in terms of awarding contracts and ethical violations in the contracting process. What I originally viewed as a nice opportunity to do some engineering work on cool systems and help out the military turned out to be a series of non-challenging systems engineering reviews in a corrupt industry that is full of hypocrisy. How the American people still support this, I don't know.
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Aug 10, 2017 00:53
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| # ? May 5, 2024 12:48 |
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biggest problem i see is - what do we do with all these brain-damaged mouth-breathing vets? we send them off to military bases and iraq and okinawa and such because we dont know what else to do with them, and they come back just as hosed up but now they have ptsd and firearm experience. what do we do with our otherwise useless young white men without a giant bloated mil-con industry
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Aug 10, 2017 01:10
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Calibanibal posted:biggest problem i see is - what do we do with all these brain-damaged mouth-breathing vets? we send them off to military bases and iraq and okinawa and such because we dont know what else to do with them, and they come back just as hosed up but now they have ptsd and firearm experience. what do we do with our otherwise useless young white men without a giant bloated mil-con industry Job training and Real upward mobility? The problem now is that your training does fuckall. if you're a trigger puller and you put in 3 or 4 years you can rollover to a 100k salary as a trigger puller. if you get hosed up or seperated early you're hosed. But you're right. getting seperates from the military feels like your umbilical coord being cut. combine that with Explosive and firearm skills you have a very toxic combination.
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Aug 10, 2017 01:17
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:How the American people still support this, I don't know. Socially acceptable American socialism. For war, its alright. For regulars poors, its a no no.
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Aug 10, 2017 01:19
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:While there may be a few programs out there like Raytheon's program to destroy ICBMs, the vast majority are excess. Why did you single this out- what's your angle?
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Aug 10, 2017 04:13
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Calibanibal posted:what do we do with our otherwise useless young white men without a giant bloated mil-con industry the smart ones get into management positions in various government slots, the rest clean my windshield with stolen paper towel at intersections
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Aug 10, 2017 04:49
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Dilkington posted:Why did you single this out- what's your angle? I singled that one out because it helps fulfil a need that citizens themselves can't perform, which is to say, stopping missiles from hitting us. It's in line with the constitutional requirement to protect the country, as opposed to most stuff in the industry which is government-sponsored fluff. Whenever I bring up the military industrial complex, the primary response is "Defense is necessary". That is true, and there are some necessary programs, I felt it worthwhile to mention one so as not to get attacked from that angle.
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Aug 12, 2017 01:53
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:Whenever I bring up the military industrial complex, the primary response is "Defense is necessary". That is true,[/b] and there are some necessary programs, I felt it worthwhile to mention one so as not to get attacked from that angle. Well, first of all: thank you for contributing to the defense of these United States Jolly Jumbuck. Second: for someone whose "least favorite institution" is the MIC (mine is slavery btw), it seems like you might permit a lot of what the MIC produces as "necessary." Programs that fulfill "the constitutional requirement to protect the country-" like, just considering aerospace for a moment- does that include radars? Link 16? ECM? Heck, if air sovereignty missions constitute legitimate defense, then surely you can justify entire aircraft.
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Aug 12, 2017 04:16
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Dilkington posted:Well, first of all: thank you for contributing to the defense of these United States Jolly Jumbuck. Some of those things are. Planes for defending the homeland are necessary, the question is, do we have an over-abundance of them? Trump (whom I generally despise) at least got my hopes up back in December when he tweeted about the specific waste of the F-35 program. He's since flip-flopped on that and called it "fantastic" but I agree with his initial sentiment - it is a bloated waste of money, and many of the other planes we produce are too. You could point to any individual plane and make an attempt to justify its existence, but you have to consider the industry as a whole, and as it stands, there are so many with such a large percentage of them being unnecessary, that it makes it difficult to justify many of them in comparison to maybe a select few that are optimal for defense. I wouldn't thank me for contributing to the defense. Like I said, most of the money from the projects I worked on (taken at a profit margin from the government and distributed to investors more concerned with the bottom line than the warfigthter) went to be stored in a warehouse. And while I did work on a little bit of missile defense projects, there were others that were more effective (which I learned about later) and that makes it difficult to justify the massive amount of money spent on the projects I worked on. I can agree slavery is a worse institution, but pure slavery has been illegal in the US for some time now. Jolly Jumbuck fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 16:59
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| # ? May 5, 2024 12:48 |
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I feel like part of the problem here is: wat do? The MIC is a terrible institution, right up there with PMCs. However, it probably has its claws in all politicians in the US. How do you go about combating the incestuous bullshit of the MIC without looking like you're not "supporting are troops". From a more practical standpoint, how would one evaluate whether a project is worth the money being spent on it?
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Aug 12, 2017 17:32
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