Simply as an observation, it’s interesting that serving in the military is usually treated as honorable, but working at a defense contractor is viewed as unethical. I wonder why that is?
I think the serving in the military seen as honourable is largely due to propaganda. There are different levels to it, but it is very obvious when coming from Europe to the US, where you see "support our troops" signs very regularly.
Nonetheless is it bad to associate welfare with honor?
Defense contracting has complex returns for its owners. On the one hand it’s a ton of fucking money for stuff that again, never sees combat. On the other hand, you have to spend that money in Alabama, not New York or Los Angeles (where rich people want to live). On the other hand, you’re spending a lot of that money in Alabama.
I sympathize with the idea that the graft and inefficiency, in this abstract sense, is unethical, at least at the same magnitude as building a missile platform. It will never be used, making it only abstractly a support of violence against innocents. Whereas some enlisted are ultimately sent out to go kill people in the Middle East — but weren’t they just the ones to lose the welfare lotto of a cushy deployment in the 9,999 other places you could be sent? Or that the drones that actually routinely perform violence at a distance are considerably cheaper than the SpaceX missile platform, so if you sought to reduce the military budget the drones would be the LAST thing that gets cut and actually violence per dollar would RISE? Anyway, the ethics are hard to boil down to some pithy one liner, it’s an immature and unjust reduction of the complexities of real politics and how we measure things.
Besides, the EU also does this. A lot of governments do.