<story><title>The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35</title><url>http://www.jqpublicblog.com/the-little-fighter-that-couldnt-moral-hazard-and-the-f-35/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Silhouette</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Placed by whom, exactly? It&amp;#x27;s not as if the US took on those treaty commitments involuntarily or expecting no benefits in return, and it&amp;#x27;s not as if the rest of the world would not adapt if the US reduced its military commitments over time.&lt;p&gt;For example, you talk about the US being required by treaty to defend almost all of Europe, but Europe already has collective defence agreements that are becoming stronger over time, over a million active military service personnel, thousands of aircraft, thousands of heavy armoured vehicles, hundreds of ships, special forces to rival any in the world, and two independent nuclear powers. There is exactly one sovereign state on earth that could single-handedly give the combined forces of Europe a serious fight today, and the consequences for all concerned would be so devastating that such a conflict is almost inconceivable.&lt;p&gt;There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.&lt;p&gt;Given the recent track record of the US, both acting as an aggressor under often dubious conditions and failing to act as a defender when weaker nations faced aggression by others, there seems little no moral high ground for the US to take here, nor any general mandate to act as the world&amp;#x27;s policeman. The alarming frequency with which the US military and its political leadership presume to take such positions anyway brings me back to the previous point about the world being better off in the long run with no military superpowers at all.</text></item><item><author>philwelch</author><text>Gigantic? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/pentagon-plans-to-shrink-army-to-pre-world-war-ii-level.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;politics&amp;#x2F;pentagon-plans...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States? By treaty alone, the US is required to defend almost all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. These are not easy requirements to disentangle from; if Japan alone were allowed and required to rearm, it could lead to an arms race that would destabilize all of East Asia and either stall or undo the tremendous economic gains that have been achieved in that region. If it wasn&amp;#x27;t for US obligations towards NATO, most of Eastern Europe would suffer the same fate that Ukraine is facing from Russia. If it wasn&amp;#x27;t for the US Navy enforcing freedom of navigation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_navigation#United_States_.22Freedom_of_Navigation.22_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Freedom_of_navigation#United_St...&lt;/a&gt;), tinpot dictators could shut down international trade by making and enforcing illegal claims on international waters.&lt;p&gt;Maintaining the Pax Americana is a hard, unappreciated task.</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.</text></item><item><author>feedjoelpie</author><text>The author mentions &amp;quot;perverse&amp;quot; incentives in Congress, but what he doesn&amp;#x27;t mention (because it&amp;#x27;s a very politically difficult subject) is the perverse incentives afforded military officers. When you have a system in which it&amp;#x27;s so common as to be expected that the officers who influence your purchasing will in a couple years retire into a job with the private contractor from whom you&amp;#x27;re purchasing, you have a recipe for bias. Even from really standup people who don&amp;#x27;t recognize their own vulnerability to influence. It&amp;#x27;s just such a common thing to work in the private sector for the same office as you did when you were enlisted that nobody blinks an eye. Because it&amp;#x27;s often really good to still have those people around.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, I think that&amp;#x27;s a pretty untenable situation. The military needs to do something to balance the career mobility of their officers with the ethical hazards of the current system. Without some rules to prevent the scenarios that have the most potential for abuse, the situation is not unlike the flow of Congress members into lobbying. Except we don&amp;#x27;t elect military officers.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a tough balance. Part of the promise of the military&amp;#x27;s recruiting is that you&amp;#x27;ll advance your career. They should fulfill that promise. At the same time, they need to make sure that the ways in which they fulfill that promise don&amp;#x27;t incentivize poor judgment on behalf of the public interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philwelch</author><text>The last time the US followed an isolationist foreign policy, the Europeans got themselves into two world wars in a row. It&amp;#x27;s true that Europe has a continent-wide mutual defense agreement now. What you didn&amp;#x27;t mention is that it&amp;#x27;s called NATO and the US is the backbone of it. That&amp;#x27;s part of how it works. Otherwise you don&amp;#x27;t get the combined forces of Europe, you get indifference at best and European war at worst.&lt;p&gt;Look at East Asia. South Korea can&amp;#x27;t afford to defend itself from the North and hope to maintain their standard of living, Japan is barred by their own constitution from rearming (and if they did, that would start a regional arms race), and Taiwan would have no hope of maintaining their self-determination by themselves.&lt;p&gt;I will be the first to say that the U.S. has followed an unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy. But a very large part of how the world works depends upon the American military, and if it just went away, we would all be poorer and less safe for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35</title><url>http://www.jqpublicblog.com/the-little-fighter-that-couldnt-moral-hazard-and-the-f-35/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Silhouette</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Placed by whom, exactly? It&amp;#x27;s not as if the US took on those treaty commitments involuntarily or expecting no benefits in return, and it&amp;#x27;s not as if the rest of the world would not adapt if the US reduced its military commitments over time.&lt;p&gt;For example, you talk about the US being required by treaty to defend almost all of Europe, but Europe already has collective defence agreements that are becoming stronger over time, over a million active military service personnel, thousands of aircraft, thousands of heavy armoured vehicles, hundreds of ships, special forces to rival any in the world, and two independent nuclear powers. There is exactly one sovereign state on earth that could single-handedly give the combined forces of Europe a serious fight today, and the consequences for all concerned would be so devastating that such a conflict is almost inconceivable.&lt;p&gt;There is a reasonable school of thought that argues the world would be a much safer place if the number of military superpowers in it was zero, and that as the only old-school military superpower remaining, the US is therefore a negative factor on global stability and peaceful relations.&lt;p&gt;Given the recent track record of the US, both acting as an aggressor under often dubious conditions and failing to act as a defender when weaker nations faced aggression by others, there seems little no moral high ground for the US to take here, nor any general mandate to act as the world&amp;#x27;s policeman. The alarming frequency with which the US military and its political leadership presume to take such positions anyway brings me back to the previous point about the world being better off in the long run with no military superpowers at all.</text></item><item><author>philwelch</author><text>Gigantic? &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/pentagon-plans-to-shrink-army-to-pre-world-war-ii-level.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;politics&amp;#x2F;pentagon-plans...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States? By treaty alone, the US is required to defend almost all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. These are not easy requirements to disentangle from; if Japan alone were allowed and required to rearm, it could lead to an arms race that would destabilize all of East Asia and either stall or undo the tremendous economic gains that have been achieved in that region. If it wasn&amp;#x27;t for US obligations towards NATO, most of Eastern Europe would suffer the same fate that Ukraine is facing from Russia. If it wasn&amp;#x27;t for the US Navy enforcing freedom of navigation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_navigation#United_States_.22Freedom_of_Navigation.22_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Freedom_of_navigation#United_St...&lt;/a&gt;), tinpot dictators could shut down international trade by making and enforcing illegal claims on international waters.&lt;p&gt;Maintaining the Pax Americana is a hard, unappreciated task.</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.</text></item><item><author>feedjoelpie</author><text>The author mentions &amp;quot;perverse&amp;quot; incentives in Congress, but what he doesn&amp;#x27;t mention (because it&amp;#x27;s a very politically difficult subject) is the perverse incentives afforded military officers. When you have a system in which it&amp;#x27;s so common as to be expected that the officers who influence your purchasing will in a couple years retire into a job with the private contractor from whom you&amp;#x27;re purchasing, you have a recipe for bias. Even from really standup people who don&amp;#x27;t recognize their own vulnerability to influence. It&amp;#x27;s just such a common thing to work in the private sector for the same office as you did when you were enlisted that nobody blinks an eye. Because it&amp;#x27;s often really good to still have those people around.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, I think that&amp;#x27;s a pretty untenable situation. The military needs to do something to balance the career mobility of their officers with the ethical hazards of the current system. Without some rules to prevent the scenarios that have the most potential for abuse, the situation is not unlike the flow of Congress members into lobbying. Except we don&amp;#x27;t elect military officers.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a tough balance. Part of the promise of the military&amp;#x27;s recruiting is that you&amp;#x27;ll advance your career. They should fulfill that promise. At the same time, they need to make sure that the ways in which they fulfill that promise don&amp;#x27;t incentivize poor judgment on behalf of the public interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sremani</author><text>So will Germans fight for Greece ? I doubt so, so what if Poland is attacked are the Spainyards willing to fight and die for that. We all know, the answer, and its a resounding NO. Italians are not going to fight for estonians.  When it hits the fan, and I am sure it will, Americanos will come to rescue and lead the charge. You have to not look beyond the late 90s and Kosovo, to look at the collective action, or should we say the inaction of European states.</text></comment>