The Arms Industry/Military Industrial Complex

[Meat Target]

1. Why is the weapons industry so lucrative? Is the R&D required to outfit a nation's military so advanced that it reflects supply and demand of those working for it?
2. Is there a more nuanced explanation for American military spending other than Israel/Saudi Arabia/neocons/lingering Cold War mentality/good old-fashioned corruption and war profiteering?
3. Is the MIC truly too big to fail? Is there any truth that, if the US and/or NATO rolled back their arms activity, Russia, China, and Iran would make a move, or is that just fearmongering?

 

[DeadFish]

Jake tran has a video which may answer your questions

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VuT334NEmR8&t=354s

 

[draggs]

1. Because if you can pew pew better than they can pew pew it's so kewl
2. Controlling the sea lanes and thus global trade, duh
3. Of course they would, duh

 

[Lemmingwise]

1. Why is it so lucrative?

Because ammunition and rockets can only be fired once and nobody wants to lose fights so everybody will spend what they can. Also, once in conflict, people will spend more than they have because they don't want to lose anything. The concept of sunk cost remains a difficult one in these instances. So countries will put themselves into debt to fight the conflict.

And if they don't, there's financial incentive to try and manouver someone else into leadership position, either through external war or internal politicking.

2. The nuance of these things is fractal. You can zoom in on ever deeper and more precise understanding and complexity. But you can get a pretty good understanding by just looking at the basics. So yes and no.

3. Nothing is too big to fail. The banks weren't too big to fail. They needed external stimulus to not fail. Icelandic bank did fail. Of course big powerful structures don't fail easily. I don't expect us to see it in our lifetimes. But who knows, some things have rotten from the inside to such a degree that suddenly they collapse.

Also countries are always making moves. You only have to take a cursory glance at chinese adventurism to know they'll do whatever they think they can get away with. And yes, there is also fearmongering, in each of these countries about each other. American military might completely dwarfs what all other countries could mount together. Though how long that would hold with all trade cut short is a question, though that type of all-out war is hard to imagine when there are nuclear options.

 

[JoseRaulChupacabra]

Why is the weapons industry so lucrative? Is the R&D required to outfit a nation's military so advanced that it reflects supply and demand of those working for it?

Because there are countries that can and are willing to pay for all that shit. State interests are talked about in history books but are certainly not confined to just historical fact. Even today counties are asserting themselves and have regional rivals.

With regards to the level of R&D, I would say that yes, it is necessarily the latest and greatest if you're a country looking to be (and remain) the world leader.

Are there a more nuanced explanation for American military spending other than Israel/Saudi Arabia/neocons/lingering Cold War mentality/good old-fashioned corruption and war profiteering?

Hmmmm... this is where it gets more interesting. Being the world police means you can dictate a lot of things, and those not willing to cooperate can expect a delivery of democracy from a variety of methods.

Some would say its important so that the oil keeps flowing, but we'll see what happens as America produces more of its own oil. There's also the concern of global trade. Secure trading routes are good for that.

Is the MIC truly too big to fail? Is there any truth that, if the US and/or NATO rolled back their arms activity, Russia, China, and Iran would make a move, or is that just fearmongering?

Is the MIC too big to fail? Well, nothing is too big to fail, but it'll take a landwhale a long time to burn through all that fat.

Well, even with all the cool toys coming out of defense contractors and the might of the US, China for their part is certainly making moves to secure that nine dash line of theirs. That would allow them control of shipping lanes going into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.

Russia has its own problems, but took Crimea and no one could really do anything about it.

The historical trend has always been that when one empire goes away, another one takes its place. Absent a regional power, a bunch of smaller states compete for the profitable areas.

 

[Drain Todger]

With arms sales, you can charge whatever you want (within reason; in the US, there's a regulatory limit that kicks in if a contract goes too far over-budget), because you're always guaranteed to have customers. The Defense Industry is huge, and they have trade shows like Eurosatory that are just like CES, except with suits walking around showing each other tanks and shit.

In the US, military spending is mostly due to institutional inertia and the sheer size/number of bases of the US Armed Forces and the amount of equipment that needs constant maintenance and so on and so forth. If you look at the budget breakdown, you will see that the military spends twice as much on maintenance as they do on procurement.

Here’s the breakdown of the Pentagon’s budget request

The Pentagon is prepared to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in FY20.

www.defensenews.com

Those Black Hawk tail rotor assemblies and gearboxes have to come from somewhere, right? Take Lockheed's buyout of Sikorsky, for instance. Imagine inheriting millions of dollars worth of spare parts contracts for the Army. You don't even need to sell them a new helicopter and you're already raking in the dough.

Military stuff tends to be very expensive, not necessarily because it's truly cutting-edge, but because it has to be ruggedized well beyond the limits of ordinary consumer-grade gear in order to withstand vibration, shock, temperature extremes, saltwater spray, etc. A lot of stuff that's military-grade is very costly but also very antiquated, usually because by the time it goes from development to actually being in service, a decade or more has passed.

Take the F-22 Raptor for instance. The avionics in that plane originally ran on the 25 MHz Intel 80960/i960, a RISC chip that originally launched in 1984, because that's what was in the specs. It didn't enter service until 2005. The CPU in your smartphone would literally run circles around the CPU modules in an F-22, yet that hardware costs millions of dollars.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

People tend to view the MIC as the ultimate evil due to being indoctrinated on "War is always bad" and that every (western) country should embrace love rather than prepare for war. Not to mention that, statistically, Big Corn and Big Pharma killed far more people than the USA army had in the last decades, while Big Tech is a far greater threat on people's freedoms than aircraft carriers and tanks.
The only real argument against MIC is government spending, but this doesn't take into account that army research projects can be used for civilian purposes and that, in the end, the most important thing to the economy is stability, which can only be guaranteed by force of arms.

The biggest problem is that we reached a global state where the USA and its allies are far superior technologically than their potential rivals, who just do crappy imitations of USA tech and would just zerg rush if a war actually starts, kinda making the R&D aspect pointless.

 

[usernames can change now!]

Funny I see this thread now, I was just considering buying Kratos stock.