It's utterly hypocritical that the "defence" industry/sector is not called what it really is, the war industry.
It's utterly hypocritical that the "defence" industry/sector is not called what it really is, the war industry.
PS DefenSe in the us.
104 comments
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It's a fairly recent development. It was created as the department of war by Washington and remained that until 1947 where it split into the departments of the air force and army, joining the already existing department of the navy, which together made up the national military establishment (NME), which was renamed 2 years later to the DOD.
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Oddly enough, this also coincides with the time when the US military was more explicitly about offence rather than defense. After the Revolution, people mistrusted the federal government having a large standing army. The army was raised up in time of war, and everyone went home when it was over.
Post-WW2 was the first time the US kept a large army in "peace". Been that way ever since.
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defense
offence
Make up your mind!
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Claiming the US was not immensely offensive before WW2 is laughable Even in the 19th century when they colonised plenty countries and took control from from Britain or Spain,...
And this in the most brutal way.
It was the period where they gained the most land and influence.
"the people" or their opinion has nothing to do with it and they could't give a shit about what they mistrust or not.
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Still the work of Edward Bernays and others, the father of modern propaganda.
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- Military-industrial complex
- War machine
- Merchants of death
There are many names.
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A way of keeping people employed usefully in many highly skilled jobs so you don't need to give them social security payouts for being jobless. In this way it is a truly excellent idea.
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The problem is that it happens at the expense of other jobs, and the lack of transparency makes corruption way too easy.
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"The Ministry of Peace"
-Orwell
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Please respect and enjoy the peace ☮️
- Emperor Cleon, who ended the galactic wars
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funny how the israeli military is called a "defense force". haven't been doing much defending.
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I have been calling them the genocide force for the past year
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Diaper force
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But when you're Hamas, defending your country from invaders: terrorists!
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"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
- President Muffley, in Dr Strangelove
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Old joke from when I was in engineering college.
What's the difference between a electrical engineer and a civil engineer?
One builds the bombs one builds the targets.
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The US used to have the Department of War. Then it split up after WWII into the departments of the army, navy, air force and the overseeing department was renamed the department of defense. Probably a branding thing.
edit: a word
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100% branding. Cant go around admitting to attack and start wars. Its defense, guys. On other countries soil. Right?
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You're talking about the same industry that coined the term "preemptive strike" instead of calling it what it is: starting a war.
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"I didn't shoot a baby, I neutralized a threat!" - the IDF
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I’ve always heard to it referred to as the “military industrial complex”. Eisenhower tried to warn us about it in the 1950s.
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Smedley Butler was warning us in 1935. War is a Racket .
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They also cause Famines, Plagues, and Pestilence. They have whole departments devoted to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
They're not a one trick pony.
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pollution/conquest, death, famine, pestilence.
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It was the department of war but the government decided that that name was too honest, makes the corpos look bad too
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Protecting your own country doesn't always involve actively declaring war with everyone. Often it's economic or cyber infrastructure hardening related
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For countries like Finland, the Ministry of Defense is not about offense, and is very heavily armed.
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And they already stopped using the swastika in 2017!
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Yeah ... no.
Ask Europeans if they feel working in that industry right now feels like anything but for defensive reasons.
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Indeedy, my wife works for the German army.
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So the US and Shitrael
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OK then, I feel likes our defense industry is working for US imperialism and hegemony.
Which is our role as vasals.
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Soon to be the "Ministry of Peace".
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The attack industry
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Gentlemen! There will be no fighting in the War Room!
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You just realized that?
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No
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Then it's not really on topic...
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They literally renamed it from ministry of war to defense to justify all the Western wars of aggression.
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WWII was the war to end all wars, so we couldn't have a department of war anymore. Still "needed" and army , navy, marines and all the weapons for them though so we created the department of defense.
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BS, it was a result of Bernays and his propaganda (which he also renamed 'public relations')
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A lack of a standing army has implications. It's a huge drain on an economy that filters resources into tanks and guns rather than schools and healthcare. It also has ripple effects in places that aren't strictly military.
The US massively overproduces food. The reason is that farms were heavily subsidized during WW2 in order to feed an army where every soldier would potentially need a 3000kcal diet after matching all day, every day. Those farms dropped that money into automation, and that meant they still had the capability to produce that much after the war.
Dropping farm subsidies would have meant plunging that industry back into depression. So the subsidies kept going. You could nationalize the farms, but that doesn't happen for obvious reasons. Nobody has come up with another idea for getting out of that trap.
Contrary to what MAGA thinks, free school lunches aren't there to support "moochers". During the draft for WW1, 1 out of 9 draftees were rejected for reasons related to malnutrition during childhood. Those programs exist to make sure America can draw up an army. MAGA doesn't remember that lesson and undermine their own objectives in the process.
You need to subsidize heavy industry, too. Car companies become tank companies in times of war. Therefore, you better make sure your car companies survive in "peace" time. Hence all the government financing of those companies. Chrysler (or the company owning it) has been stumbling from one financial boondoggle to the next for my whole life because of this.
Even worse, you want the tank factories to stay tank factories. Which means Congress needs to order new tanks even when they're not needed otherwise, or else those factories close. Same goes for ships and planes.
None of which used to happen until industrialized warfare forced the issue. If Originalists want things how it was in the first few decades after the Revolution, then the military should have had its funding and staffing at anemic levels for about a decade now. Except that genuinely would be a problem in case of another big war.
A solution to this is to take our ball and go home. As long as Canada and Mexico are friendly, we face no threat on our own continent. An oversea invasion is impossible (I can go over the details of why, but it comes down to logistics). The scaffolding of an army and a navy focused on shore defense would be fine. Keep a few nukes if we really have to.
MAGA would never go for that, either. They're isolationist in some ways, but still want a giant military for some reason.
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Well I mean yeah. "Defense" just sounds better on TV.
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Regardless of what you call it, making the production of weapons an 'industry' is psychotic.
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let's look at how well it worked out when a country turned over it's nuclear weapons and relied on treaties to keep it safe.
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Someone who works in said US defense industry here
Neither defense nor war really apply to what we do, but between the two defense is the more apt description. The DoD largely uses a strategy of deterrence, where the technology we develop and training done for the "war fighter" is just public and visible enough that no other major country wants to take the risk of going into full open conflict with the US. Since most efforts go into deterrence, and deterrence is a defense strategy, it does become the more appropriate word.
Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don't throw the entire nation into wartime. Plus, in a round about way proxy wars help with the deterrence since we get an outlet for the decades old stock piles of arms that we no longer want and want to replace with the new stuff. If our waste products are being useful in places like Ukraine, it helps build up an idea of what it is we keep for ourselves, again building up a deterrence of openly and directly attacking the US
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Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don’t throw the entire nation into wartime.
because keeping the wars 'over there' and impacts from said conflicts minimal on the populace (no drafts, no rationing, no sacrifices) makes it easy to send the youth to be blown up in far off places.
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What I was referencing by proxy war was Ukraine and what Israel was supposed to be. The US sends arms to another nation with the intention that the other nation, who is already in conflict (or just happens to be through dubious and convenient circumstances) will take those arms and give political adversaries a bloody nose or serve as enough of a distraction that they won't come after the US and keeps the US from putting boots on the ground. Is working out quite well for us in Ukraine, Israel was supposed to distract the middle east but turns out that when you hand a genocidal maniac a bunch of weapons, he's gonna do maniacal genocidal things with them. Who could have possibly guessed
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Surprisingly honest from someone who works for the US imperialist regime.
They do indeed let others do the fighting in proxy wars and regime changes, invariably in conflicts they created to gain/keep influence.
If not by directly creating and arming terrorists like the headchoppers in Syria who they now totally rehabilitated.
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It is a war industry for the Western countries because the war is never on their soil. It is a defence industry for everyone else.
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yeah russia sure is defending the shit out of itself invading ukraine.
I get it, western countries bad, but for fucks sake have a bit of perspective.
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Yep NATO expansion and coups can go on just so far.
They knew ukraine was a red line bcs NATO nukes there are too close to defend from.
And they are actually defending not only themselves but also the ethnic Russian (ex)ukrainians since nobody in the west cared when the US funded trained and armed the fascists that terrorised them for 8 years. Maybe you get some perspective, I can hear your propaganda nonsense every day in any western MSN.
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The war is never on their soil? WW1 and 2 and Yugoslavia ring a bell? And Ukraine is a western country too.
They predict that Russia will attack western Europe in 2027, by the way.
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We are talking about the war/defence industry which is a much newer thing when countries started selling weapons and such to other countries on a large scale and during their own non-war times, like the last 50 years of American history. If countries sold weapons to each other during WW2, it was because they were involved in the war themselves. Nowadays, it is just selling weapons and watching others burn each other down.
Predictions have been going on since forever about so many things. Doesn't make it any truer. China is going to annex Taiwan, Russia is going to attack Europe, Iran is weeks away from nukes. Funnily, there are no predictions about USA doing stuff.
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LOL
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104 comments