this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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That's fine. But it isn't just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It's the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don't realize they're getting into a retreating field.
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn't the exception in the Senate, he's just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on... they're all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and "business-friendly" subsidies, he's right in line with the Dems in his state's congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it's not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren't that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you're losing staff from one to the other.
When you're the US Feds, money isn't real. You can spend 20% of GDP while carrying a $35T debt and nobody cares.
But you still need to spend the money on stuff. You can't buy a trillion in waffles because that many waffles don't exist. Similarly, you can't hire $2T in engineering talent over 10 years without depleting a well of talent shared by other engineering professions.
You're creating an enormous vacuum in the industry when you can pay 2x-5x what other engineers are making and you're employing thousands of people for the job over a decade.
This isn't a question of "hybrid". This is a question of "which college has the best graduate salaries?" and "which professors are in the highest demand into the next decade?"
$2T over ten years is it's own (very lucrative) industry. That's before you get into the draw this has on electrical engineers and materials specialists and management training.