Yeah I understand skepticism over the USE of our military, but being categorically against our military having expanded military capabilities is just intentionally weakening ourselves. It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
We only directly applied napalm to the skin of a couple thousand children, what are those stinky hippies still whining about? They saw the USS Maddox get attacked twice while performing peaceful maneuvers in our own backyard, the Gulf of Tonkin! We only dropped 21,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange, it hardly causes birth defects any more, only a few hundred writhing harlequin babies a year at this point, what exactly is the fucking problem?!
I wish the gunshots came after formal declarations of war by Congress, something that hasn't happened since before the current and previous Presidents were born.
Also wish Congress wasn't a clown car perpetually headed off a cliff.
But the Department of War became the Department of Defense, so I guess all these gun shots aren't war anymore.
And as for the gun analogy, I'm reminded of the "production for use"[0] defense from Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday:
"And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did."
Congress being a clown car is problem #1 for sure. Though congress unfortunately is at least somewhat or perhaps majorly representative of the will of the people so the problem is mostly that we're idiots.
I hear you on the need for a declaration of war, but as I'm sure you realize, it's not practical for most of the modern conflicts we find ourselves in. Congress has also explicitly given the Executive the power to conduct limited engagements because conflict develops much more quickly in many cases than Congress can act and we need to be able to respond quickly.
Now of course one might argue something such as that we shouldn't be in areas or be doing things that could instantly cause a conflict and of course that sounds great to me, but then after a second glance you realize that, well, for example Americans must get oil and gas from the Middle East and so here we are without a formal declaration of war protecting shipping lanes.
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong
TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
Is that argument wrong? Over the past few decades US military adventurism has been, on the whole, harmful to both the US and the rest of the world. Having "expanded military capabilities" seems to have done the US more harm than good, even ignoring the opportunity costs of spending on those military capabilities rather than more productive things.
Well, history is certainly written by the victors eh? The military is a tool used to maintain the empire of an unsustainable culture of consumption. This military is KILLING people in Yemen (a country with which the US is NOT at war) because they are delaying shipments of stuff. Stuff getting from a to b on time and for cheap is worth more than human life.
Go live as a civilian in a country that our military has decimated with bombs and then say again that "military bad" is just a vibe.
Yep, this is the naive rhetoric the GP was talking about. It’s totally okay for Houthis to lob missiles at American boats with American citizens on it and doing anything but letting them do so is “imperialism.”
Is this serious? Like literally one of the things the US navy does is provide protection to ships flying the US flag. That’s literally one of the main things the navy does in peacetime. Remember the Somali pirates? These are ships traveling through international waters being attacked - what other response would make sense?
As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.
It's a little odd to talk about "historical" Houthi trends since the founder of the movement was young enough to have almost certainly seen Die Hard. The Houthi movement was created to replicate the Iranian Revolution on the Arabian Peninsula, and borrows its slogal from Iran, including "Death to Israel, a Curse On The Jews". One of the very first things the Houthis did after taking over their stronghold of Sada'ah was to eject the remaining Yemeni Jewish residents. Houthi antipathy towards Israel isn't an elaborate geopolitical issue; they are foundationally an anti-semitic movement.
Moving a step away from facts towards analysis: the Houthis are widely considered to be an arm of the IRGC (the IRGC counts them in their "axis of resistance"). The Houthi/Saudi war seems to have been instigated in large part by Iran, whose long term conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in MENA.
It probably doesn't make much sense to talk about what set of concessions would get the Houthis to stop; they've attacked ships indiscriminately, and have been doing so long before October 7.
Yeah for sure. Concessions also don’t work when they’re perceived as a weakness which tends to culturally be true in the Middle East.
The only thing I’ll note is that groups can have multiple goals. While destruction of Jews/Israel may be a rallying call and was a founding principle, Houthis can want other things and do have other enemies (Saudia Arabia is disliked by Houthis independently of Iran’s conflict with them).
> I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
You really think that's the only and most likely explanation?
This criticism is coming from the people being asked to make the weapons. Just because one isn't against the military having expanded capabilities, doesn't mean that one wants to spend their time creating things used to kill people.
I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".