"I drink your milkshake!"
Posted on 06/01/2026 8:25:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the defense budget are politically untouchable. Wars end, defense spending does not.
At first glance, this would suggest that the United States is entering an era of military restraint and fiscal austerity. In practice, the opposite is happening. In April, the White House released its budget blueprint for fiscal year 2027, requesting roughly $1.5 trillion for defense. That is a 44 percent increase, and the largest single year jump since the Korean war. The same blueprint proposes a non-defense discretionary spending cut of around 10 percent, with housing and healthcare programs among the targets.
Despite growing anti-war sentiment, the political impossibility of materially reducing the defense budget remains nearly absolute. Pentagon spending continues to rise, procurement programs survive repeated public criticism and even politicians who oppose intervention abroad often continue to support enormous military appropriations at home.
Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s most reliable critics of militarism, fought to base the F-35 (a program he has elsewhere highlighted as an example of excess and waste) at Burlington International Airport in Vermont.
This apparent contradiction reveals the reality that the Armed Forces no longer function solely as a military institution designed to project power abroad. They have evolved into one of the largest systems of domestic wealth redistribution in American political life. The US does not merely use defense spending to fight wars or deter adversaries, it uses the defense economy to sustain regional employment, subsidize industrial production, stabilize local economies, train and employ the underserved and maintain a broad political coalition.
In this sense, defense spending increasingly resembles a hidden welfare state. Rather than redistributing wealth through direct transfers, the state does so indirectly through military contracts, bases, supply chains and federally subsidized employment. This helps explain why anti-interventionist sentiment has failed to translate into meaningful cuts in military expenditure. Americans may be increasingly skeptical of foreign wars, but few in the political sphere are willing to threaten the economic architecture built around permanent military spending.
The modern defense budget functions, in many respects, as a form of industrial policy. Major weapons programs are often dispersed across congressional districts, ensuring thousands of firms, subcontractors and workers become economically dependent upon continued military procurement. The F-35 program depicts this dynamic clearly; production of the aircraft is intentionally dispersed across dozens of states and hundreds of congressional districts. The aircraft becomes more than a weapons system, evolving into a nationwide economic ecosystem upon which businesses, families and entire communities depend.
A defense bill can more easily pass a Congress that would never approve an equivalent housing or jobs program. When redistribution is obscured behind a patriotic shroud, it can more easily survive political instability.
Military bases perform a similar function. Across large swathes of the United States, bases act as economic anchors supporting businesses, housing markets, schools, logistics networks and local tax revenues. Entire communities become structurally dependent upon the continued physical and economic presence of the Armed Forces. The political consequences of this have been felt before. Following the end of the Cold War, policymakers attempted to shutter redundant bases through the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process.
Even where military planners viewed certain installations as redundant, members of Congress fought closures aggressively. The BRAC system was largely designed to overcome this political resistance, as legislators routinely opposed the closure of bases that functioned as major employers within their districts. Military bases increasingly functioned less as purely defense assets and more like federally subsidized economic development zones.
The economic role of the American defense apparatus extends beyond bases and contracts. The military itself increasingly functions as a substitute for parts of the civilian welfare state. For millions of Americans, military service provides stable employment, healthcare, vocational training, subsidized education and a pathway into the middle class that might otherwise remain inaccessible. In a rapidly deindustrializing America, and amid growing fears that AI may disrupt segments of the labor market, the Armed Forces continue to represent one of the few guaranteed routes to upward mobility.
Serious military austerity would not merely reshape American foreign policy, it would also disrupt labor markets, educational pathways and regional economies that have become deeply intertwined with the defense state itself. The political durability of defense spending therefore cannot be explained solely via lobbying or corruption within the so-called military-industrial complex. Defense contractors undoubtedly wield enormous influence in Washington, but the deeper mechanism resembles something closer to economic codependency.
Universities receive Pentagon research grants; manufacturers rely on military procurement; municipal governments rely on defense-related economic activity; and millions of Americans depend, directly or indirectly, on employment tied to the defense sector.
The result is a coalition in which politicians, labor interests, local governments and contractors all possess strong incentives to preserve high levels of military spending. The US may no longer sustain enormous defense budgets solely because it expects large-scale war, but because the defense economy has become one of the few politically acceptable means through which the federal government can pursue industrial policy.
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"I drink your milkshake!"
Bkmk
“ Looks like permission to me.”
So you and Saddam had something in common then.
To me it looks like ambiguous. “We have no interest in the literally hundreds of border squabbles in every corner of our he globe.” The unsaid part of that is “unless it affects American interests” which invading and subjugating an entire sovereign country which supplies a product vital to Western economies most certainly did.
Saddam was an arrogant narcissistic murderer who thought he was untouchable.
He chose poorly.
Whatever the details he was not “tricked” into invading Kuwait. His own hubris did that.
L
There is one area which does not fit cleanly with the rest...
Strong AI because we are up against Chinese AI research.
At this point AI is being marketed as a solution for all sorts of purposes, but it typically has very limited strategic value to our country, our businesses, or our military. You are basically quoting the narrative of the marketing currently in vogue.
Current generations of AI models do have value, and that is why I am an enthusiast and use AI for many purposes. That is why I started this thread because in the not-so-distant future (a year or two) local hardware, the computers that we possess ourselves will be multiple times more powerful and will be in a price range that normal people can afford and justify purchasing.
But various studies show that the quality of work being performed in nearly every area and for every purpose tends to get worse not better when AI is used by professionals and enthusiasts alike. AI likely does have and will continue to have value but at this point it is far less than what the current marketing indicates. And in fact, we are currently being saturated with AI slop that is hindering rather than helping our society in many ways.
“The briefing examines a profound paradox in modern workplace technology: while artificial intelligence is marketed as an productivity “easy button,” empirical data reveals it frequently erodes worker capability. By analyzing recent studies from Harvard Business School, MIT, and Stanford, the video exposes how over-reliance on large language models (LLMs) stagnates professional skill development, injects “trend slop” into strategic planning, and creates false perceptions of efficiency. Ultimately, the narrative challenges the prevailing corporate view that general-purpose AI can seamlessly automate high-level knowledge work without severely degrading output quality.”
Here is the video:
https://youtu.be/xBHuEbp0hrE
And here is the time stamped summary:
https://gemini.google.com/share/ac7a19ef79d7
Sorry, I had a typo, It should have said, “That is why I started another recent thread”.
Great respect for you using AI at home. I heavily use Grok Perplexity and chatGPT. How about this. 33% of the current Iran war is US AI vs Chinese AI.
Plus on the US side add in Israeli military AI, which must one of the worlds best. During this 6 week cease fire USA and Israel have been conducting max reconnaissance of Iran to find their hiding places for missiles drones fast-boats etc. All data is run through US and Israeli AI.
NVidia employs 2000 there at a research center
Sorry, but I believe in strong borders and immigration control. As I've often said.
If you're still unclear about what I believe, ask me. Don't assume.
You have some fundamental misunderstandings about how AI is used in warfare. This is definitely not a contest between China's AI resources and our own. Adding more and more massive data centers all over the county would have little to no effect on war efforts. It just does not work that way.
There is no way to quantify a war as being “33% AI.” Military AI is not an independent combatant fighting another AI in a digital arena; it is software integrated into hardware (drones, cyber warfare, radar tracking, and satellite imagery analysis). While the US and China are locked in a tech cold war, China's involvement in Iranian military infrastructure is primarily through hardware sales, oil trade, and diplomatic backing—not deploying proprietary frontline military AIs to fight American algorithms.
Reconnaissance of Iran is constant, 365 days a year, via satellites, cyber espionage, and signals intelligence—it doesn't just spike because of a specific ceasefire window. More importantly, AI does not magically “find” everything. AI in reconnaissance is used for “computer vision”—scanning thousands of hours of satellite footage to flag changes in terrain or vehicle movements that human analysts might miss. Humans still verify the data.
AI war like I said
Reconnaissance of Iran is constant, 365 days a year, via satellites, cyber espionage, and signals intelligence—it doesn't just spike because of a specific ceasefire window.
Of course this spiked. And it is all AI crunched unlike ever before to find IRGC weapons stashes. Especially their shoreline and Hormuz. This is how they stop international shipping oil etc.
Do we use our military beyond this? You will say no.
Beyond what? Protecting our borders?
Of course not. The military should only be used for defense, not for "projecting power."
That's not only libertarian, it's America First.
I guess you're a Neocon in search of monsters to destroy.
I stand corrected... somehow this recent image just came out showing a current battle somewhere in Iran.
So our competition will extend beyond their borders but we/USA will not. Your libertarian ideas only work in a world without war and aggression. Sorry bud but there battles going on for world control. China and Islamic lebensraum top the list. Russia is on this list.
Very nice home generated AI image! What are your other uses for home gen AI?
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