this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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To make a slight counter, the Defense Department does more than fight. We have humanitarian mission capabilities, and we use it. When shit goes down, you want the military to roll in.
I've told the story many times, but after Hurricane Ivan I assumed I was on my own. When the Florida Guard rolled in the next morning I was weeping in the streets, on my knees, thank god, thank god. I had no idea there would be any aid. Most humbling. Tearing up now in fact.
I also wept, most literally, when the Mississippi Guard rolled in after Katrina. My FIL was there. Two bronze stars from Iraq, the Mississippi coast broke him, PTSD. He was never the same man after cutting houses in half with chainsaws, pushing corpses aside, leading the tip of the spear.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Whoever said it, or didn't, we need such men.
alternatively, instead of having the military have these capabilities perhaps fund non-military departments to do it
it’s a function of the US military being bloated that they can use some of that bloat to do other things, but it’s far from efficient
This isn't necessarily bloat, it's things the military needs to be able to do. Like 90% of the military is just good logistics and the ability to move resources anywhere in the world quickly. That's good for both an army on the move and helping hurricane victims.
Logistics is effectively the hardest problem and the most expensive one.
A lot of people don't realize that a lot of wasteful spending is effectively required in order to maintain any semblance or level of readiness.
If you are not manufacturing equipment, ammunition, and similar items then you have no one and nowhere to actually manufacture them. A large part of spending is keeping the people, skill sets, facilities, and supply chains running and operating at a minimum required level to support an increase in need. If you don't do this then when you need it, you can't manufacture it anymore, your entire supply chain has to start from scratch.
It's incredibly wasteful but also somewhat necessary.
Yep. Same reasons we can't built a Saturn V any longer. All the supply chains, expertise, etc., are long gone. Imagine keeping all that up to run a B-52 Stratofortress. And yet we do it!
Don't deport it to El Salvador then.
There also has to be redundancy in the supply chain for critical items. That can look like wasteful duplication to someone who doesn't understand how the process works.
There’s an old WW2 story, where a captured Nazi officer realized they were going to lose the war… Because he overheard American officers complaining that they were running low on ice cream. Nazis at the time were eating their own boot leather while they froze to death in Russia. Meanwhile, the Americans were complaining about a lack of ice cream.
The logistics behind the American military is honestly a modern wonder. If they were willing to divert the time, manpower, and resources to do so, they could erect a fully staffed and stocked McDonalds anywhere on the globe in less than 48 hours. Imagine an entire restaurant being built in a single weekend. Now imagine it in the middle of the ocean on an oil rig, or at the North Pole. The sheer amount of resources and manpower required would be monumental by most standards, but it wouldn’t even be worth a footnote on the military’s expense report.
a fully operational mcdonalds is fully fucking useless. this is not a flex. the logistics are impressive and necessary yeah, but not for shitty overpriced burgers. that's just yay for corporate defense contracts.
You think Grunts prefer a Olive Garden?
Such a scheme sounds better, but the discipline and infrastructure to make it happen?
We're not talking social workers replacing cops, we're talking hard motherfuckers doing what it takes, under orders, no failure.
Anyway, if you ever live the other side of a true disaster, you might see what I mean.
If you'd stopped at the end of the second paragraph I might even have upvoted, but then on the third paragraph it started sounding a bit too much like one of Trump's "crying tough guy" stories, and by the end of the post it was full on pro-war.