Now what about all those newly unemployed people that worked for or were supported by the DoD? What about all the companies involved in defense that you just put out of business, what about their employees?
During WWII, commercial sector manufacturers quickly switched to defense production. It can work the same the other way.
Defense contractors have top of the line engineers and scientists. They can transfer their efforts to energy, transportation, communications, healthcare.
The jobs will follow the money.
Guess what , WW II happened 80 years ago, since then the economy has grown more complex, more interconnected and more specialized.
There are no magic wands, the national defense industry can’t suddenly change sectors nor will the massive, long term disruptions in the labor force from attempting to do that suddenly vanish because we wish them away by beating the cumbaya drums , singing out slogans about our noble intentions and start hugging trees.
Then you have to deal with the millions of employees that work for the DoD, not to mention all the state and federal agency employees that are indirectly involved with it. What do we tell them? Sorry you just lost your career, good news though, you can go build windmills now.
Unlike WWII, we are not expecting Defense Contractors to switch overnight. It will happen on a contract by contract basis. As one defense contract expires, new contracts will appear in the private sector.
Defense Contractors will follow the money.
So you accept that fact that your WW II analogy is invalid? If that’s the case then good, we’re making progress.
A gradual wind down of the the military-industrial complex is possible but you would have to a thorough long term plan for accomplishing it, with all the negative consequences taken into account up front, along with plans for contingencies. Then you have to muster the political will to stick to the plan over a long enough period of time to actually achieve appreciable results, how likely is that in our current political climate?
Here’s a contingency for you, what if those contracts that we expire are simply taken up by foreign governments and the defense contractors just start building weapons for other countries? There’s demand there right? What do you do about that possibility?
WWII proved industry is capable of changing direction. That is still valid.
Not really given that the economy at the beginning of WW II was completely different from the economy of 2021 and so were the CIRCUMSTANCES, there is no WW II today and there was no military-industrial complex at the beginning of WW II.
It’s like saying that just because we used to depend on horses for transportation 100 years ago proves that we can go back to depending on horses today, so let’s get rid of the Auto Industry.
Nobody is advocating we just pull the plug on defense industries. But we spend 42 cents of every defense dollar in the world. Other countries spend it on modern infrastructure, education, healthcare.
So what happens if instead of a $750 billion defense budget, we have a $650 billion defense budget with the other $100 billion going into other sectors?
Defense contractors will follow the money
Yeah, defense contracts will follow the money, they’ll follow it right to the foreign governments that are willing to spend it on defense, unfortunately they’ll likely leave many of their current American Employees behind.
What you’re advocating is going to take decades to bear any meaningful fruit, you’re going to need to sustain the political will over that period of time to achieve it, what happens the next time the Republicans are in power? You think they’re going to go along with your plan? What happens if another major war crops up between now and then?
We have decades to accomplish a transfer from military to commercial. Butter instead of guns. We just need to start
Other nations have done it and they have more modern infrastructure, lower cost healthcare, lower cost higher education, their workers have more benefits. It comes down to priorities
We have a more powerful military than the next ten nations combined. We need to end our paranoia
Not eliminate our military but reduce it from $750 billion a year to $500 billion. We will still be safe.
We need to stop being the worlds policeman and let other nations assume the burden
I'm all for the laudable goal you're suggesting, heck I would even be onboard for cutting defense expenditures to an even greater extent than you suggest if it were practical.
However the issues that I pointed out still remain unresolved, specifically the political will over decades required to achieve it and the issue with the rotation of the defense industry to foreign shores and/or other domestic pursuits. The last time any meaningful effort to cut defense spending was in the 1990's and the so called "peace dividend", how long did that "plan" last? Less than 10 years, by 2000 defense spending was $5 billion less than what is was in 1990 (not adjusted for inflation), between 1990 and today defense spending as a % of GDP has fallen significantly but that just represents the fact that the economy grew faster than increases in defense spending, defense spending has been increasing in terms of dollars ever since. So what we REALLY achieved is reducing the year over year INCREASES in defense spending, not the spending itself.
Now, you have warhawk elements firmly entrenched within the GOP establishment that will cut short any such plans the moment they get back into power and you still have to deal with the fact that any moves toward stopping the military-industrial complex gravy train will bring about an enormous amount of resistance from the defense industry (think armies of lobbyists and mountains of campaign contributions, even larger than what exists now).
What your plan *might* be able to achieve is some short term nibbling at the edges but it's highly doubtful it'll result in meaningful long term spending reduction.
The status quo is that the military is over-extended and under-resourced, you have to first reduce the scope of its mission (requiring the voters to get behind that) and then begin to bring resources inline with that smaller mission scope (again requiring the voters to get behind it) and then *maybe* we can get everyone onboard to sustain that new level of spending over the long haul, that is if another boogie man doesn't crop up between now and then that puts us back on "
gotta be ready for a major war that will last decades" mode.
