Whenever I read about the military-industrial complex or the power of the arms lobby, I find myself uneasy. With investment funds or political NGOs, the judgment often feels simple: whatever they do is assumed to be harmful. But the case of the defense industry is more complicated.
It is not only wealthy owners and generals who buy from them—sometimes with the usual temptations of influence and corruption. The military-industrial complex also consists of ordinary men working in factories. It includes engineers and technologists whose work allows them to grow professionally. It generates technological progress that later spills over into many other areas of life.
Of course, I would prefer if these same people were building humanoid robots for hospitals rather than weapons—though it is worth noting that pharmaceutical manufacturing often provokes even more public hostility than arms production. Yet we live in the real world. In that world, more money is spent on weapons than on medical robots.
And in that world, many of those weapons are purchased by people who ultimately use them for questionable purposes. Sometimes it is possible to prevent them from reaching the very worst terrorists. But honestly—are the so-called democratic powers always so much better?
Among the imperfect options available to us, it is still better to be the arsenal of the world than a collapsed country without industry. And perhaps we may hope that this path leads, eventually, to a future in which wars are fought by robotic armies, leaving human beings with nothing to do but accept the outcome.
For the defeated, that future would still be grim. But it would be less grim than a world of millions of dead.