The military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat.

Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.

In 2024, the average American spent about $17,000 on taxes. Nearly $4000 of that went to the DoD, about $3500 went to interest on federal debt.

I think it’s fun to think about it in this way. I personally spend hundreds of dollars a month on war.

Or hear me out, we improve life here on Earth...

Can we really accelerate any probe to faster than 1% c? Or 2% c?

Can we swap the US Military and child care budgets for just one year please?

Just one year

It would be AMAZING

> Can we swap the US Military and NASA budgets for just one year please?

It would be nice.

There is a pretty well known interview of Admiral Grace Hopper by David Letterman, where she talks about her famous "nanosecond" and explaining (to Generals) why it takes so long to get a message to a satellite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU (As an aside, Grace was a name she lived up to in a way few others could, if you have never seen that interview it is well worth a watch!)

The valuable and well understood lesson is that latency is tyrannical, and unavoidable. The only real customer for "data centers in space" is spacex for war fighting. You don't want that data, and it's analysis going back around the world. You don't want to put compute close to the front lines, and you certainly cant deploy it for the kinds of "special operations" that the US has been doing for the last two decades.

Is there a civilian use? Maybe. Ships, oil platforms, and remote locations could all see a use for this, but it isnt going to be that impactful.

Realistically, getting military spend back to more "dual use" applications would be great. We have a LONG history of this in the USA. Tons of Army core of engineers projects. The interstate highway system was born out of a need for better logistics. NASA was about missiles, space was incidental. The US computing industry's foundations fell out of the navy code breaking efforts of WWII. The internet (ARPANET) was a DARPA project to start with. Spread Spectrum and its roots in Torpedos (navy again). GPS, the auto injector (epi pens).

Most of these are far in the past, recently the biggest thing we have gotten out military investments is TOR (and one could argue its in decline).

I think we don't see as much coming out of the modern military because it is grossly mismanaged. It's become reliant on private industry to "innovate" and that has a relentless focus on the bottom line.

Yes it would be nice if we did that spending swap, but it will never happen realistically. I think a change of leadership, of intent could result in far less waste and much more benefit for the American public. We have proof we can, we just need to figure out how and make it happen.

> Or even what we fund Israel's 2/3 of all their weapons are bought by US

And all of the money the US gives to Israel is earmarked for American products.

The US gives Israel $3.8B a year (and 2/3 of their weapons are _sold_ by the US not bought). The budget of Nasa is $25B.

But by antisemite math and logic says we’ll get 10% light speed.