/edu/ - Education

>>7638
The Soviets tried to convert military gear to civilian use, in order to claw back some of that value. Like they tried to convert tanks into tractors and construction work machinery. Most of that didn't work well because tanks are fuel guzzlers and maintenance hogs.

Some of it did work tho.
-They managed to build a north-pole explorer vehicle on the basis of a converted tank which was pretty inspired.
-Then there are the spectacular rail de-icing/snow-clearing machines that use old jet engines like enormous hair-dryers.
-They build the ultimate fire-engine by taking a tank and sticking a custom turret on it that uses 2 jet-engines with water injection. This thing was powerful enough to spray out the infernal fire-torrent of burning oil-pipelines.

Military transport helicopters, and supply-trucks were also successfully converted to civilian use. There is a very successful company that makes super rugged all terrain trucks that came out of this.

The US has a cargo-lifter helicopter with a unusual inter-meshing dual rotor design, which got converted from doing military supply drops, to search/rescue and forest-fire-fighting.

>>7638
>Is it just a tool to extract value from other countries?
Yes from the perspective of the imperial bourgoisie they are investing into means of conquering in order to extract super-profits from the periphery. Well to the extend they are rational actors. A lot of the military industrial complex is just a racket for private contractors. The most expensive toilet seat was a whopping ten grand.

>>7639
Well that's true, and computers and internet and GPS are all military developments, so I guess there's some tie-in to what people actually find socially necessary.

>>7640
So I guess it depends on the point of view: if it's from the POV of the bourgeoisie, the military is necessary, so they fund it. But from the proletariat point of view it is a surplus resource sink and a tool of imperialism. Then most of the military is a waste of human life.

However that still leaves me confused: what is being created by this industry? Of course we can tally up how many human hours work for the MIC, but is it or is it not work that goes into creating value? And if it's not (because it's not SNLT) what is being created?

>>7641
>So I guess it depends on the point of view: if it's from the POV of the bourgeoisie, the military is necessary, so they fund it.
Yes but not for every capitalist, the circle of capitalists that benefit is shrinking. Some capitalists are loosing out. We're sort of nearing the end of the age of empires as well, which means that the returns on investment for imperial stuff are going to shrink and eventually it'll turn into a loss.

>But from the proletariat point of view it is a surplus resource sink and a tool of imperialism. Then most of the military is a waste of human life.
Well the world has anarchy between states, so you can't do without some amount of military, but yeah upholding a imperial system that's a drain. That's why all empires fall.

>However that still leaves me confused: what is being created by this industry?
Like you said there's some technological offshoots. Politically i think the current crisis period will "produce" more assertive pacifism.

>Of course we can tally up how many human hours work for the MIC, but is it or is it not work that goes into creating value? And if it's not (because it's not SNLT) what is being created?
You need work to create value, but the reverse is not necessarily true, not all expenditure of work creates value. For example all the human effort expended for the 2 decades of Afghanistan forever-war yielded roughly nothing. All the dead/maimed and all the grind that went into it, poof.

It doesn't create value.
Eisenhower was calling out the two obvious threat to what had taken over the US, that he was tasked with representing. Aristocracy fears a military coup - this is the most obvious way the nascent globalization project would be destroyed at home - and it fears industry that is not in service to aristocracy. and technological values not lining up to aristocratic desires.

In effect, he was calling for the MIC to not be independent of the true ruling power, and appealing to factions in the US public that were more amenable to seeing the militarists as a threat than the aristocratic project.

>>7641
The military is most unnecessary though. It's well known that most of these weapons platforms will be obsolete and scrapped without seeing significant use, and their use as a deterrent is questionable. The purpose of all of the military apparati in the past century has been primarily defensive. The German war plan during the Nazi period was no exception. Retards think "offense won", but the Germans expected that if they did not engineer the swift victory backed by internal coup, they were going to have to continue pressing, and defend the Nazi imperatives. It just so happened the Nazi imperatives weren't "defending Germany", but defending their stolen hoards of gold as the rats slinked off and left the German people to eat shit.

If you took these weapons for an offensive war, they get utterly destroyed against any half-competent defensive strategy. Setting up a modern war entails a ridiculous setup of siegeworks before the war begins, logistic expectations of what will result from it, and limited war aims. General war becomes far too difficult to control or predict, and no one is in the business of throwing away their big and expensive military because it's a freeroll.

One reason why it was a fools' errand to believe Bush would attack Iran (aside from there being nothing to gain and the known existence of the Iran-Contra network).