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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.

In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.

Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.

So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.

What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?

This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.

Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.

Is there a typo somewhere in your post? You said we spend $892 million on the military and Trump wants to go to $1 trillion. Elsewhere people are talking about a 10% increase in spending. But going from 900 million to 1 trillion would be way, way more than 10% to say the least. So I figure one of the numbers has to be in error here.

Oops, typo. Now corrected.

This is the most passive aggressive way to point out a typo I have ever seen, the online equivalent of 'bless your heart'. Everyone knows US military spending is in the high hundreds of billions, with a B.

It's not passive aggressive, and I did not in fact know that. I'm not sure why you would expect most people, let alone everyone, to have the faintest idea what US military spending is.

For what it's worth, I didn't read your comment as passive-agressive.

I can sort of understand if you didn’t think about the semantic content of what you wrote, but there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance. The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.

Like, if you saw a headline tomorrow saying, “Trump to buy Greenland for 50 trillion dollars”, you should know immediately that that isn’t true. Even if Trump said those words, that would be orders of magnitude more than anyone has ever paid for anything ever.

there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance.

I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I certainly don't agree this is one such case.

The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.

But you do need to know that the military has that many people. I certainly don't, and said as much.

Also bear in mind the context of this whole sub-thread. I never claimed to be good at estimating what the military budget is. Hell, I never claimed to be good at anything. Hydroacetalyne is the one who accused me of being passive-aggressive, on the basis that "everyone knows" the military budget is way bigger than $892m. All I'm saying here is that everyone does not know that, nor is it realistic to expect them to.

For calibration, $892 million is less than two large US Coast Guard cutters. But it's definitely easy to not think about just how large numbers/fundings are if you don't work with them on a regular basis, I'll agree with that.

Thanks, that does put things into perspective. Like you said, I don't work with these kinds of numbers at all so I really had no idea how much this stuff costs.

Yeah, military procurement is mind boggling -- sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not so good. Even a single missile is costing at least $100k, sometimes more than a million. And that's only procurement, not the costs of fuel or personnel or maintenance or infrastructure.

You thought 'the US spends less than a billion dollars on defense in total, yet also more than the next eight countries' defense budgets combined' passed the smell test?

Why on earth would I have any more idea what other countries spend on defense than I do with the US? I don't think you're factoring in how little basis for comparison the average person has here. To an individual, $892 million is an enormous amount of money. Even if I lived 100 times as long as I will, I still wouldn't come close to having that kind of money (I've done the math and figured I'll make about $2 million in my lifetime if things go well). I have no idea how much military equipment costs. I don't even have any idea how many people the military employs. So I don't even have figures I could use to try to make a rough estimate (not that I would've bothered, because I could just look it up easier than that). This is simply not a topic which your average person would have any reason to know about.

Oh, give him a break. Most people are bad at math, especially when dealing with such large numbers.

official sources say $892 billion https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/07/hegseth-trump-1-trillion-defense-budget-00007147

million would not make sense

Thank you. I had no idea what the spending actually was, so I didn't have a frame of reference to judge numbers as making sense or not.

I loathe Trump, buffoon that he is, but I'll admit he did effectively kill wokeness which was great. If he does this, it will be another good step in my eyes. Storm clouds are gathering, and the US needs to be ready one way or the other.

In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.

This is very wrong. If adjusted for PPP values and differences in accounting (e.g. what's kept in black budgets) then China spends nearly as much, if not more than the USA does. Worse, China is concentrating that in one area whereas the USA is spread out all over the globe still (including, foolishly, much of the Middle East). The notion that nations can invest in some nukes and then forget about foreign policy while assuming nothing bad will happen is silly.

More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 million to about $1 trillion. Source.

Unsurprisingly, Politico doesn't mention that the administration mooting an up-to 90,000 reduction in the active-duty component of the Army, out of current US Army size of about 450,000 active-duty.. This is about 20% of the total size of the active-duty US army. It is also in the ballpark of the total number of US forces in Europe in 2025. That doesn't imply an intent to withdraw every last soldier in Europe, but it does create a Europe-force-sized-hole in the US army.

Nor does it factor in how the US navy is advancing some long-mooted concepts of buying warships from allies and leaning into foreign shipyards for naval shipyard capaacity, like the South Korean shipyard MOA signed... today. Which has implications for things like the multi-year backlog in the American naval yards mentioned in the linked article.

In other contexts, 'we are looking at cutting the Army by the size of peacetime forces in Europe and want to re-orient investments towards the neglected Navy' might be considered a notable defense policy adjustment worth acknowledging. It reflects a substantial cut in status quo capacity in some fields (current Army activities globally), with potentially relevant implications for the next conflict- say a naval conflict.

On the other hand, Trump bad, and here is a Politico article to encourage that sentiment.

Thank you. I read the daughter comments first specifically to see if someone would point out where this new money was going.

First off, I think increasing the US defense budget by 10% is surprisingly sane, as far as Trump ideas go. Of course, this is faint praise, given that my scale is "wrecking the global economy".

Second, while it is good to know that his administration is also cutting funds in areas of the military, you did not contest that the overall DoD budget will increase, which is the story here.

I am also kind of sorry that I don't get to see DOGE taking the chain saw to the military/defense/intelligence behemoth. But then, I did not really expect that to happen. To many MAGA jobs depend on building overpriced military toys on the taxpayers dime.

Second, while it is good to know that his administration is also cutting funds in areas of the military, you did not contest that the overall DoD budget will increase, which is the story here.

The point would be that the raise in the overall DoD budget without the additional context of the structural reorientation of the DoD is a misleading boo-outgroup story rather than the story. It is fodder to insinuate corrupt motive, as opposed to a policy shift consistent with years of bipartisan consensus that had been delayed by the middle eastern wars, and later the focus on the Ukraine conflict.

Well, I have no desire for the US to get into a war with China so from my perspective, if that is the idea of the military restructuring then yes, Trump bad.

The best way for the US to not get into a war with China is for China not to try to invade Taiwan. That's more likely with a strong US Navy, not a weak one.

Or the US could just declare in no uncertain terms that they will not defend Taiwan, which would probably spark a nuclear arms race in the region (and potentially increase the odds of Taiwan hitting the Three Gorges Dam out of spite, killing who-knows-how-many civilians) but I imagine would lower the odds of a Sino-American war.

It strikes me as painfully naive of you to assume that the US would not eventually see itself drawn into a Sino Taiwanese-Japanese-Indian-Phillipineo war.

With foreign policy hypotheticals I don't necessarily make realistic assumptions about what the entity whose policy is being considered would do.

Like, I don't think the US is very likely to declare in no uncertain terms that they will not defend Taiwan! But if a cabal of people who thought that we should avoid war with China controlled the US government indefinitely I think that they could also avoid getting drawn into the war you mention. I think that Japan (and likely South Korea) would grab nuclear weapons, India already has them, as hydroacetylene points out Taiwan would probably roll over, and the Philippines (assuming the US did not colonize them again) would get bullied and pushed around by China the same way they already have been. That means that China would be at least somewhat restricted in its ability to use coercive diplomacy to blob acquire additional territory.

(Incidentally why hasn't Trump put the Philippines on the to-grab list next to Greenland?)

I don't model China as being set on global domination through territorial conquest any more than the US is. Perhaps I am wrong. But regardless of whether or not they try to militarily acquire portions of India, Japan, or the Philippines, if the US was controlled by a cabal of people who thought that we should avoid war with China, I do not think China would attack us randomly. As far as I know China does not claim any US possessions, nor do I think they would be likely to go to war with the US over our Pacific possessions. Simply refusing to get involved in a land sea war in Asia is actually a valid option. (As I point out, a valid option with major costs to the United States!)

My point here is not that this is realistic or probable or even good. My point is that if you made me SUPREME DICTATOR OF THE UNITED STATES and my imperative goal was to avoid war with China, I would remove Taiwan as a potential flashpoint.

Taiwan hasn't shown any willingness to fight before now, these aren't slavs(who, despite their many flaws, don't have that specific one). Taiwan would just roll over without American protection.

Niether did Ukraine until February 2022.

Probably.

That will greatly increase the chance of having to fight the PLA in the Philippines or Japan or Guam or Hawaii.

Fighting in the Philippines or Japan are wars of choice inasmuch as neither of those are actual US territory (and I doubt that China will actually be eager to invade Japan if they do what I expect them to do).

Even if the PRC took over the rest of the Pacific, there's a pretty easy reason to believe they would never try to invade Guam as long as we weren't interfering with their conquests.

I am not saying this is a good or wise policy. I'm just saying that if we want to avoid war with China we can almost certainly do it simply by refusing to fight them over their core national interest.

(I do find some of the "China is so powerful they could successfully invade a single island within helicopter range even if the US opposed it" framing funny. I don't think there was any point in the Cold War where Russia could have seriously contested an American invasion of Cuba without using nuclear force. The very fact that China's power is framed by its ability of being able to potentially reclaim lost territory that is literally on their own doorstep shows you how incredibly powerful the US remains even though I think the Good Old Decade of US monopolarity is gone.)

Anyway China, in my superficial reading, is not a good or benevolent neighbor, and they will do bad things like "invading you in a punitive expedition because you obliterated their military ally Cambodia after it attacked you repeatedly for no reason" but I don't think they actually want unlimited territorial expansion. They did not attempt to hold portions of Vietnam after their border war, for instance, as I recall.

(Of course the counter argument is that nobody wants unlimited territorial expansion but the logic of empire means that you either keep growing or you stagnate and die, and thus whatever China wants now is immaterial. It's not a bad argument.)

All wars are "wars of choice".

For one side.

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China didn't do well enough in their border war to seriously demand territorial concessions from Vietnam though, did they?

I don't think they did meaningfully. But presumably they could have fortified the ground they did take. Perhaps it would not have been worth it even if they had wanted to take over Vietnam, though.

Please, let's stop at ONE mega-stupid thing from this administration.

Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired

He's not entirely wrong. The US military has spent most of the last twenty five years busy with counterinsurgency ops, which has left its conventional warfare capabilities in a rough spot. Though the problem is really specifically the Navy.

I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world

Don't worry, the plan is to cut taxes as well.

Don't worry, the plan is to cut taxes as well.

Is this the plan where you cut taxes by x and then cut spending by 1/3 of x?

The tax cuts will pay for themselves :V

You can tell which party is out of power by which one becomes what Krugman calls "debt scolds." Worrying about the deficit is always, 100% of the time, no exceptions, an ironclad rule of the universe for all of time and space forever and ever amen, a soldier argument meant to attack whatever the deficit-increasing policy is itself. In this case, for those who make your criticism, it's usually the very idea of billionaires keeping more of their own money.

For DOGE, it's the legions of Democrat-voting federal workers who would be better unemployed.

The federal debt will only be dealt with when America is facing total destruction. Medicare, Social Security, military, and debt servicing will never be cut. America would sooner commit suicide. Worrying about the debt is not a serious argument or point of persuasion.

I do not think the US was facing total destruction when the Clinton-Gingrich regime ran surpluses. Obama-era sequestration wasn't big enough to "deal with the debt" but it was a big step in the right direction.

The actual politics is that deficit-reducing policy is only possible under a Democratic President with a functional conservative Republican majority in at least one house of Congress. The good news is that this could become a long-term norm if Trump trashes the Republican party's reputation, but not by enough to overcome Senate malapportionment.

The US can keep borrowing indefinitely as long as the dollar is the global reserve currency. That reserve currency status is a central cause of the trade deficit that the current administration is railing against. Ending the trade deficit, the stated goal of this administration, will therefore necessitate a much more fiscally disciplined federal budget moving forward.

Except that there have been moves away from the petrodollar as global currency. Saudi Arabia nearly dropped the Petrodollar, and the Russian sphere from what I gather has already switched to the Ruble. China wants to make the Renbei the reserve currency. If (and I think it’s a when ) the world stops using petrodollars, not only will the debt and trade deficit matter a lot, but given the number of dollars in circulation globally, we’re talking about Zimbabwean levels of inflation.

Well, knowing Trump, this is probably just empty boasting + big round numbers ("ten billion dollars") + grift for him and his cronies.

But if it actually goes through, I can see the logic to it. China is rapidly buiding up its navy, much faster than the US and allied nations. We can't use nuclear weapons because they do too (plus it's just horrible). And raw dollars are misleading, since their military gets paid a lot less, so in PPP it's a lot closer. Same with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Hell, we've been fighting the Houthis for over a year now, and we still haven't been able to completely shut them down. Some ships are still avoiding that area. The US can protecdt its homeland, but it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of global dominance that it once had.

The obvious conflict would be China trying to take Taiwan. I have a hard time modelling this as a shooting war between the US and China which does not have a significant risk of evolving into a nuclear war.

Basically, any invasion would be supported by assets in mainland China, and trying to fend it off without striking at them would be like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

Of course, once you bomb military assets in a densely populated region, shit is going to happen. Sooner or later the Chinese will ask themselves why they should suffer their hospitals being blown up without also retaliating against the mainland US (though I imagine that the CCP is more resistant to public pressure than the US -- but even they are not immune, see the covid lockdowns).

Hell, we've been fighting the Houthis for over a year now, and we still haven't been able to completely shut them down.

I am surprised that you are surprised by anyone's failure to pacify a region through bombardments alone.

I mean, sure, the US could turn the area the Houthis control in a parking lot. However, this would kill tons of innocent civilians and we don't do that anymore. It is not that the Houthis have a single enormous catapult which you can destroy to shut them up. Presumably, the weapons they use to attack ships are man-portable, and likely hidden in their deepest cellars of the towns.

To really crush them while also leaving a few civilians alive, you would need boots on the ground. Given how previous US operations of that sort have turned out, I think it is correct to be sceptical.

What is your argument exactly.... that no amount of larger military spending could possibly beat a small insurgent group like the houthis, but it's also useless against major powers because everything would just be nukes? most military simulations do not agree with either of those.

His argument RE: houthis seems simple and obvious: No feasible amount of spending can obviate the need to commit to either a strategy of eradicating yemen entirely or one of putting it under indefinite occupation.

We could it at least give it a shot, before we give up on it entirely. Right now the US is just tickling them with small amounts of precision tomahawk missile strikes. This isn't like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we're trying to pacify an entire large country. We just want to stop a thin strip of land near the sea from launching missiles at ships.

Alright, revise my post to "eradicate any human presence on the coast of yemen or occupy it indefinitely". Or what exactly are you suggesting? Patrolling the waters to intercept all boats that might conceivably contain pirates, check them for weapons, then detain the armed ones - forever? And intercept any missiles through technological means? AFAIK (which is little) that's close to what's already being done, maybe throwing more money at that could indeed tighten the mesh until shipping can return to normal. But would that be a permanent solution?

Increased PGM strikes and naval bombardments until they've destroyed all of the anti-ship missiles that the Houthis got from Iran. It doesn't need to be a genocide or an extended occupation. It's just the sort of thing that having more mass of conventional weapons in your military helps a lot with, which is why I support this sort of budget increase.

Consider Gaza. It is tiny: 40km by perhaps 10km. It has been blockaded by Israel (a first world nation on the same tech level as the US) for decades. After the Hamas attacks, Israel fought hard to reduce Hamas capabilities, with very limited concern for the civilian population. Years later, and the surviving militants still find the odd missile to fire in the general direction of Israel.

Realistically, stopping the Houthi attacks on shipping will require someones boots on the ground. The obvious choice would be to just give the opposed party in their civil war (the republic of Yemen) enough materiel to conquer their opponent, then turning a blind eye to the human rights violations which will certainly follow their victory (if they achieve their victory, that is).

Quite frankly, I am not sure if this is a good idea. A mixed strategy of limited suppression of launch sites, interception of anti-ship missiles and establishing a missile attack insurance system might be more reasonable.

The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war.

AI could turn the tide here very quickly, but I'm not sure I trust Trump to understand the stakes involved or delegate to someone who does.

I suspect that wouldn’t be the type of battle you could fight with tanks.

Yes, it would be won by other technologies he understands even less

$100 extra billion is basically a rounding error. elon could fund it

Elon does not have $100 billion in liquidity, nor does he have the capability of generating $100 billion in liquidity over a 1-year period. Even if a sucker bank could be found, a healthy financial regulatory apparatus would immediately step in to prevent massive systemic risk.

He took out a $45 billion credit line https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/musk-and-tesla-compensation-or-control

In fact, however, to maintain his voting power, Musk seeks to avoid selling his Tesla shares. As an alternative, he borrows money, using shares as collateral. On December 4, 2020, Musk had borrowed $515 million against 265.0 million Tesla shares, which had a market value on that date of $52.9 billion—more than 100 times the amount of the loans on those shares. On April 19, 2024, Musk had 238.4 million shares pledged for loans, equal to $43.5 billion at Tesla’s stock price on June 13, 2024.

There is this popular notion I have seen it a lot on hacker news and Reddit, which purports that billionaires are not actually as wealthy as indicated by their net worth because their liquidity is tied up. This is generally false, especially when said equity is in stock, which is liquid and where all parties can easily agree upon a price. Tesla stock is extremely liquid, and there is a huge market for it. This is how collateral works, in which Elon pledges stock to an investment bank as collateral for a credit line. The bank can hedge this risk and profit from fees. Yeah, artwork or collectibles are different and there may not be enough liquidity to absorb a large sale, but stock and real estate are more liquid and transparent.

He took out a $45 billion credit line

That is not what the paragraph you cited means. He has $45 billion worth of Tesla stock pledged as collateral. That doesn’t mean he can borrow $45 billion USD against that collateral.

He doesn't want to sell because he still wants to retain voting rights. If he wanted $100 billion liquid cash he could get it either with loans (using tsla as collateral), selling tesla shares, etc. Due to the inherent volatility of Tesla, likely such a loan would need to be double collateralized , so the OP is right that he could not access all of it, but I think if he wanted $100 billion he could get it. This is what many billionaires do. They pledge stock as collateral to borrow billions of dollars without having to actually sell the stock on the market, and without paying taxes. He came up with the funds to buy Twitter.

He came up with the funds to buy Twitter.

He did. This was

  1. Only $44 billion instead of $100 billion,

  2. Also collateralized by the value of Twitter itself as an asset, and

  3. The banks which financed the deal lost money, making Musk a less-than-desirable customer in the future.

The paragraph even gives a ratio! "100 times". If he borrowed at the same ratio against every bit of stock he had, that would total to about $3B liquid, not $100B. He could free up a lot more wealth by selling stock rather than borrowing against it, but I wouldn't want to guess how much he'd tank the stock by doing so. It's not that there aren't enough potential shareholders out there to buy it, it's that everyone would be very wary of buying stock in a company whose CEO is dumping it en masse.

By this logic acquisitions would not be possible because it would tank the market. It's simply a legal transfer of ownership records from one entity to another. Nothing is sold on the market. Musk can sell his shares to an investment bank at a discount using dark pools or OTC , the bank books an instant profit and hedges it. musk gets his cash.

No; in an acquisition you have someone willing to sell overbalanced by someone else heavily motivated to buy. The buyer generally initiates the transaction, so is apparently more motivated, so instead of the stock tanking it rises by an acquisition premium.

Here, you would have Musk trying to unload $100B of a stock with a P/E over 100, balanced by ... which bank do you think wants that? They could get a 1% return with less risk by buying $25B of T-bills and stuffing the other $75B in their mattresses. TSLA commands such a high P/E because many investors believe there's still massive room for growth there, but would they maintain that belief in the face of the CEO trying to divest as fast as possible? Most wouldn't. The old joke about how "if you see the bomb squad tech running, try to keep up" applies to any knowledge imbalance of that magnitude. Could be Musk really wants to lose a third of his net worth just to bump military spending by 10% for one year; could be the tech just really needs to pee. The smart money still runs.

They can stipulate the terms of the loan in such a way as to ensure and profit and mitigate the risk of the volatility with hedging instruments. I think he could probably get $100 billion by pledging 300% collateral, which is his whole net worth.

Here, you would have Musk trying to unload $100B of a stock with a P/E over 100, balanced by ... which bank do you think wants that?

Elon has already successful borrowed tens of billions to Fund X/Twitter buyout. not $100 billion worth, but there was a counterparty.

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Acquisitions often take the form of shareholder propositions for [party] to buy the stock for a given price, which is usually higher than the current price. They don't often occur purely as market orders, which would be vulnerable to price changes, that I've seen, although the buyer often has a decent ownership position to start with. Maybe the SEC requires or strongly incentivises the shareholder vote structure, though.

It's like civil forfeiture. The govt. becomes the new owner even though nothing is sold.

War with Iran could be the bloodiest conflict for America since WW2. It’s a developed country of 90 million people capable of building and importing huge numbers of drones that Russia and even China given their current animosity would gladly lend them the money to buy. The current leadership isn’t hugely popular among some domestic elites, but the opposition is largely nonexistent and dreams of some kind of vast Azeri uprising are rather fantastical; there are still masses of peasants who broadly agree with the Islamic Revolution. American casualty tolerance isn’t near what it was in Vietnam, and even that became too much toward the end.

I don’t think Trump would go for it. But I didn’t actually think he’d go for tariffs of this magnitude either. Who knows now.

Iran's leadership is smart enough to avoid provoking the US into action. Saddam Hussein made the mistake of invading neighboring countries, Iran in 1980 and then Kuwait in 1990. 9/11 was a pretext to deal with him for good.

Do you know who was Saddam's ally in the Iran Iraq war?

Which phase?

This line typically gets used to accuse the US of aiding Iraq... after the US had spent time aiding Iran. It was kind of the context of the Iran portion of the Iran-Contra affair, which admittedly most people now adays haven't a clue about.

On one hand, perhaps alliances are whoever you helped last. Alternatively, perhaps there was a consistent preference that neither conquer the other.

Henry Kissinger: "It's a pity both sides can't lose"

(commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)

My precise feelings on Germany vs. the USSR in WW2

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point, for today's lucky 10,000.

American casualty tolerance isn’t near what it was in Vietnam, and even that became too much toward the end.

"Casualty tolerance" (or lack thereof) is overrated. What matters is whether or not the populace believes the war is valid and winnable. What did in the Vietnam War was not that the casualties were unbearable but that the American public increasingly believed they were dying for nothing - that the cause was bad, the war was unwinnable, and the government was lying about it.

The problem with war with Iran is not that America can't bear taking casualties. It's that the constituency for war with Iran is John McCain's ghost. For most of the country any number of casualties is too great because the USG doesn't have the credibility to pick that kind of fight.

I think casualty tolerance depends a lot on the context. If your home land is on the line, (like in Ukraine, or with space aliens invading New York), people are willing to tolerate significant dents appearing in the demographics.

If you are fighting ten thousand kilometers away, in a country which is not a close ally, then your peoples appetite for dead soldiers is going to be much lower.

The occupation of Afghanistan was exceedingly bloodless on the side of the US. Over twenty years, they lost 2420 soldiers.

I think your assessment that the public needs to believe that the war (especially if overseas) is winnable is correct. But I think that the typical way the public notices a war is not winnable is if their boys come back in boxes and yet the front lines remain unchanged. With Afghanistan, nobody cared if the war was winnable because the costs to the US were mostly "just" taxpayer money.

We thought that about Iraq in the gulf war and they got absolutely demolished.

I think the US military tries, or perhaps tried, to take a "pessimistic" approach by assuming the best possible scenario about the enemy. Sometimes this means that outside perspectives have a more realistic view (as I think was the case in the Gulf War, when some external commentators correctly predicted a cakewalk).

But I would prefer the US military to assume that the enemy is competent, fierce, and well-equipped.

Five things:

One, Iraq had just spent 8 years fighting bloody trench war against the Iranians, which had worn down their military.

Second, The Iraqi Army had a lot of specific issues that made their unit cohesion particularly bad.

Third, there was a much bigger deficiency in Iraq’s air defenses than modern day Iran, which meant that the Air Force had pretty throughly diced up the Iraqi Army before American ground troops even started moving

Fourth, while he’s often stereotyped as a moron due to his years in the Bush Administration, Colin Powell was actually an extremely competent general who employed a very nifty encirclement strategy that collapsed the Iraqi Army with relatively little fighting. If he had gone with the boneheaded frontal assault strategy that the crayon-eaters in the Marine Corps wanted to use, you could have very well seen 30,000 American casualties on just the first day (which is what the internal planning was estimating).

Fifth, Saddam’s Invasion of Kuwait was the geopolitical equivalent of knocking over a liquor store, so he got zero outside help or support. Iran would likely receive a substantial amount of support from Russia, Yemen, Shia paramilitaries in Iraq, and possibly even China.

Also, geography.

Iraq is pretty flat and featureless other than the giant rivers; a classic border region or “March” where two powers clash.

Iran is an absolute nightmare of jagged peaks and long mountain valleys which is many times easier to defend and hide in.

All the technology on the world can’t completely compensate for good ground.

Iraq's military was composed of veterans who could fight at the level of or better than the Iranians at the time. Iraq's air defense system consisted of the best western export equipment at the time, and was battle tested against the Iranians and Israelis.

you could have very well seen 30,000 American casualties on just the first day (which is what the internal planning was estimating).

Even in instances where Iraq held an on-paper local force advantage, they were still soundly beaten down in practice.

Maybe, as Colin Powell put it, the US does deserts, not mountains.

Flat frictionless plains with spherical cows, where the planner’s plans can shine.

I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.

How big do you perceive the stick to currently be? I've been hearing for some time that our army is fairly clapped out, and notable signs of serious dysfunction in the Navy have been numerous for at least the last decade. We are very clearly going through a paradigm shift in terms of military technology that puts the value of our current stock of gear and doctrine into serious question.

Even if we're going prompt full isolationist, having a functional, effective military seems like a good idea, and I'm not confident we have one right now. Further, fixing that seems like a good way to drive native industrial buildup, which I definitely think we need.

I would strongly prefer this be achieved by fixing the current dysfunction rather than by feeding it more cash, but increased military spending does not seem obviously foolish to me.

The record of the government is that trying to fix dysfunction with more money makes it worse.

I think one of the underappreciated costs of the War on Terror was that the US dropped the ball on R&D/replacement programs. As a result we're still using a lot of old Cold War Vintage kit.

Even though I would like to see the US military slimmed somewhat, I am in a vacuum a fan of more short-term military spending just to

  • catch up to where we need to be in tech, and
  • build out giant munitions stockpiles

build out giant munitions stockpiles

The problem is the military will then turn around and make a contract with Lockheed Martin for the GigaShell9000, which does everything a regular artillery shell does but costs 2.8 million dollars per unit and four billion dollars up front for R&D. Lockheed estimates the first five shells will role off the assembly line in 2033 but they should able to produce as many as 92 shells per year, once their production line gets fully spun up in the summer of 2045.

Just imagine that I am screaming like Luke Skywalker being tortured by the Emperor at the end of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

I am a tiny bit optimistic that some of the fresh blood in the market and a sense of urgency will maybe pare this down a bit, though.

Yup - projects like the Comanche are revealing, I think. I'm no expert, but I'd figure that such a weapon could have been a highly useful and survivable platform in a Ukraine scenario compared to a new generation of Apache with some new gizmos attached, but the Army needed to allocate resources to getting a ton of mine-resistant trucks, not a sci-fi stealth helicopter. And those trucks probably won't be that useful in a war full of missiles, drones, and artillery - hence those MRAPs just got sold to police departments. Huge waste to high-end acquisitions.

Given that the US and Ukraine coalition didn't provide older helicopters, I doubt they would have given it a cutting-edge helicopter either. And that decision wasn't simply for a lack of helicopters- it was consistent with the relative(ly low) utility of combat helicopters in the war after the very early period.

I meant if the US was involved in a war of this nature, sorry that I wasn't clear. The US radically altered its aviation plans in response to Ukraine, canceling their planned scout helicopter (which didn't have a lot of the advantages the more expensive Comanche would have) because of how survivable modern helicopters look. A war with the kind of air defense Russia has would be really bloody for Army Aviation and the Comanche probably would have given them an edge they don't have currently, and it's a perfect example of a project that was canceled for the war on terror, in which Army aviation was pushed to the breaking point and had to devote everything they could to keeping the old stuff they had running.

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