You’re talking about the same industry that coined the term “preemptive strike” instead of calling it what it is: starting a war.

funny how the israeli military is called a “defense force”. haven’t been doing much defending.

“I didn’t shoot a baby, I neutralized a threat!” - the IDF

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.

Soon to be the “Ministry of Peace”.

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.

They literally renamed it from ministry of war to defense to justify all the Western wars of aggression.

The attack industry

Defense does also do defense in a lot of cases

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.

Well I mean yeah. “Defense” just sounds better on TV.

Regardless of what you call it, making the production of weapons an ‘industry’ is psychotic.

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.

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

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.