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0 pointsrayiner13y ago0 comments

Of course and that would've been the sensible thing to do. As Americans, we want a world where the U.S. is the one that has this technology, not countries who aren't the U.S. Our standard of living (1/4 of the world's resources for 5% of the world's population) literally depends on that state of affairs.

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danielweber13y ago· 2 in thread

The US doesn't need military dominance to have 1/4 of the world's consumption. It needs to be able to pay people who have 1/4 of the world's production enough that they sell it to us. And about 80% of that latter group are Americans anyway.

rayinerOP13y ago

That works until the country that does have military dominance decides to conquer you and take that production for itself. The market is meaningless when force can be used to take what you can't purchase in the market.

It is possible to be a wealthy nation that doesn't have military dominance (Switzerland, etc). The key is to be overall small enough that you can consume a lot per capita but still fly under the radar of the big boys. A country as big as the U.S. doesn't really have that choice.

danielweber13y ago

Okay, I think I misread you. The meme of "the US only has 5% of the world people but consumes 25% of the world's resources!" is usually said by people who think it's "unfair" that the US is consuming "so much."

If you are saying that the US needs military dominance because we need to protect our own domestic production from invasion, that's something else. I still disagree but not as forcefully as I would to the other characterization.

(If an invader tried to invade America for the purpose of seizing our wealth, much of it would evaporate instantly. They can capture factories but more and more of it is IP that a potential invader could just stay home and pirate instead.)

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lolcraft13y ago

I don't know, I wouldn't necessarily want to be associated with this. An hypersonic plane, and CPGS technology in general, looks for the layman like me, more like a tool for a very limited type of extremely hard force projection. Well, maybe it could be used for reconnaissance, at most. But it's not particularly useful for counter-terrorism, since that takes on ground intelligence. It's useless for defense. It's not even a deterrent, you won't go MAD with it; the whole point of CPGS is that a strike with this thing should not guarantee a nuclear or ballistic response, after all.

To put it plainly, this plane is made for intimidation. If the USA is to support its standard of living on it, then it's not worth supporting.

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