dalem

Without meaning to give ANY compliments to our government's fine military procurement system I'd rather see 10B spent on an ABM technology that might work thatn a superjet that we don't really need right now.

-dale

Blademaster

Second that.

If you study history, technological advanced nations who don't continually explore new ways of fielding better weapons are doomed to defeat at the hands of another nation who attempted to find new ways of beating the current status quo.

What people don't realize is that every dollar we spent on R&D on anything gets recycled back through our economy and magnifies the effect by 3-4 times. The problem is that those effects are not quantifiable. What's not quantifiable are skill sets and knowledge gained. We as a whole country improve our knowledge base everytime we try something no matter how little of a chance we succeed.

A failure is worth 1000 successes because failures teaches us what works and what don't and we continually improve our knowledge. As long as USA remains unafraid of taking risks and take on risky and unknown projects, USA will remain as the most powerful and technological advanced nation in the world.

dalem

That's pretty much how I see it too.

-dale

Broken

I study history and I draw a very different conclusion. The US, prior to WWII, spent almost no money on military R&D. Yet, once the US entered the war, the result was a forgone conclusion. Why? Because we were the Shaq O'Neill of industrial powers.
Heh, heh. Being a scientist, I worship at the alter of R&D. There is no (per capita) economic growth without the development of new technologies or discovery of new resources. And we are pretty much done discovering new resources.

However, there is a limit on how much R&D a country can produce. There is only so much technical talent. Once a country's technical people are fully employed and have the tools they need, any additional money spent produces diminishing returns.

Since there are limits on what R&D can produce, it makes sense to invest technical talent wisely. Don't waste it on wild goose chases.

If you invest in military technology, then you are taking away from the commercial sector. To really destroy the US as an industrial power, put all our R&D into weapons research. To rebuild the US as an industrial power, trim military R&D as much as practical.

Remember the 1990s? The real "peace dividend" was all the unemployed Defence R&D talent. They went and worked in companies that fueled the 90s economic boom. Now they are back in defence and guess what's happened to the economy?
No doubt. But in this decade, basic research has been cut. H-1 visas to bring in foreign talent have been restricted. We need the foreign talent, since our own education system fails to meet our needs. Half the research PhDs in this country are foreign born.

Meanwhile, the military R&D money is spent on physically implausible systems like the HTK interceptor ABMs up in Alaska. Even worse, this R&D project is being put into production without passing even very basic proof-of-concept testing.