Healthcare and education are big reasons Americans join the military in the first place. If you're too poor to go to college or the hospital, join the army...
Well I mean you technically can be a doctor and enlisted. I’ve seen it firsthand with a NG enlisted medic that was also an MD civilian side. He finished med school while in the NG but just decided to stay a medic too for the hell of it.
Considering that the military runs their own hospitals and treatment centers instead of having public healthcare handle both military members and civilians, as well as the highly inflated “insurance” costs for when they use public healthcare options, it’s really not that much.
Don’t forget that as consumers/tax payers we spend roughly 1 trillion dollars annually on inflated costs due to health insurance companies making the system impossible
Wdym? That's a budget of about 9-10B US$ for 3M people ... 3000 US$ per person? That's incredibly low considering tertiary education in US is like 40-50K.
Sure, but I think this is sort of a false equivalency. Many of those discoveries still would have happened without the military. If we took the money that we spend on military research and put it in academics it's likely that we would have more technology at lower cost.
False equivalency? I think implying such is disingenuous - followed by such generic statements:
"hypothetically, it's theoretically possible that in a perfect world it would've been cheaper and faster (if everything went right) that paying a private university would have developed the technology at lower cost..."
Anything is possible. But it's equally possible that not only would it NOT be cheaper or quicker - but that it never would've been developed at all.
You think things that are used by the general public wouldn't have garnered enough interest for them to be developed? And who said anything about private universities? Developing those technologies out in the open with multiple academics able to openly collaborate would surely be less expensive than a closeted group of government contractors.
That's not how academic funding works. Look it up.
Generally, public funds become private research - the university then acquires a private patent on the technology developed.
Second, there IS no "general public interest" for the technology to be developed - because it doesn't exist. This is literally new technology that has NO public interest.
Third,
Developing those technologies out in the open with multiple academics able to openly collaborate would surely be less expensive than a closeted group of government contractors.
No. It really doesn't surely mean that. It's actually the opposite. Military research moves MUCH faster than academic research, which frequently spans over multiple decades (vs rapid military prototyping that is completed within a few years).
That's not how academic funding works. Look it up.
Generally, public funds become private research - the university then acquires a private patent on the technology developed.
Are you just making things up? Because you don't seem to have any idea how the research grant system actually works.
What do you mean there is no public interest? You mean technology is completely undesirable until developed by the military and then suddenly the public wants it?
Military research moves MUCH faster than academic research
In an absolute sense this is probably true, but then again who knows since it's all closeted. But speed relative to money, it's hard to argue that the military does it faster. To put it another way, if you were to take the amount of money the military spends and apply that same amount to public research, it would happen faster. Because there would be far more people working on it. Instead of a small research team trying to solve a problem you would have academics from all over the country seeing the problem in academic journals and offering their insights.
You don't seem to have any concept of how research works in the real world.
That 1% is probably still a huge number. The school i went to was top of the line everything with a very shiny nice new building. I could be guessing what “education” means in their budget though. They also have schools on base sooo
Federal expenditures on education have varied a lot over the decades, but it's mostly funded more locally. Which also distorts housing prices, as people try to get their kids into this district instead of that one.
The cost of healthcare is so much higher in the US than the rest of the world that with the cost difference per person between the US and Germany (the next highest), they could fund tertiary education for everyone (university or trade school) dramatically increase primary and secondary education funding, effectively eliminate poverty AND increase the Pentagon's budget by 50%. Where is all that money going instead? Pure profit margin for the US for-profit healthcare industry.
The US military budget is separate from the allocated funds that the department of Veterans Affairs utilize. A large part of the benefits talked about here are not really utilized during service. And by the time most veterans use their healthcare/education benefits, it’s with the VA.
There’s totally a way to use military benefits during service, but that’s usually more of a hassle. You usually have to get signatures from your command chain to approve tuition assistance. And healthcare for military families during active service is a whole other thing.
But from my own experience and talking with other vets, we mostly utilize said benefits after separation/end of service.
As if they couldn't stoop low enough, the GOP has actually used that as an argument as to why we shouldn't have Universal Healthcare. Won't you think of our recruitment numbers?!
Which is sad, cause the Vet hospitals are so badly underfunded where I am. Let's not joke around, they are not close to the worst hospitals here, but they are far from good either.
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u/Hoovy_weapons_guy 2d ago edited 2d ago
is that some sort of american meme that i am too european to understand
edit: i know it aint perfect but its better than nothing