Wasn't the US military responsible for the shoddy levies that contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster?
It also has repeatably failed to stabilize several middle eastern countries - In about a year, adults born after the start of the Afghanistan war will be eligible to serve in it.
And on the "cyber" front it repeatedly gets caught flat-footed by smaller, less funded operations in Russia and China and has to go to congress, hat-in-hand, asking for more money while the cyber command budget is already 10x the rest of the globe's.
It’s also responsible for the flawless operation of multiple mobile nuclear reactors.
I didn’t say the military would be good at everything, but when you need massive coordinated response to an emergency, the military is the absolute best equipped to do it from a capability and coordination standpoint.
They already do tons of work for major mobile disaster relief.
Did land person on moon.
Do have world's biggest tech companies / Vertical landing rockets / AI leadership etc.
Doesn't sound like we are bad at hard things although we do have our fair share of screw ups.
Landed on the moon, ok that one was hard. But let’s get realistic here. There are events like the Manhattan Project, the Operation Overlord/D-Day landings, the Apollo missions, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl... these are the things that required coordination and cooperation across tens to hundreds of thousands of humans, organised into hundreds of subgroups responsible for aspects of the overall outcome in complex interdependent ways... these are significant human achievements.
And then there’s things like Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Microsoft, these are for the most part companies driven by money. Either the accumulation of it for a secondary goal (SpaceX needs money to pay for a mars colony), or the accumulation of it as the primary goal (Microsoft has a quarterly earnings target to hit)
Comparing across these two categories feels horribly unfair to the people who aren’t in it for the money. The astronauts, the soldiers, the scientists and the liquidators (a term for the people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup)... this isn’t to say the achievements of today’s companies are nothing, just that these two categories are driven by two tremendously distinct drives and comparing the results directly as though 100% equivalent feels inappropriate.
It also has repeatably failed to stabilize several middle eastern countries - In about a year, adults born after the start of the Afghanistan war will be eligible to serve in it.
And on the "cyber" front it repeatedly gets caught flat-footed by smaller, less funded operations in Russia and China and has to go to congress, hat-in-hand, asking for more money while the cyber command budget is already 10x the rest of the globe's.