• Aqarius@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I don’t know why they constantly trim it, but the full quote is “Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.” It’s from a book about Afghanistan.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Full of people that will never see $30,000 in their lives. Fighting for people that live luxurious lives in Europe.

        • Bazell@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          That awkward/ironical moment when a literal flying brick of explosives can do the same damage as an advanced rocket system without costing a fortune.

    • chisel@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      Geez, $240k for the reusable launcher and $200k per missle, with other similar but less effective missles costing $33k and RPGs (which have 300m range instead of 2500m range and won’t kill the same level of armor) at an astonishing $80 a piece. That’s more surprising to me, $80 is crazy cheap!

      But damn, I wonder how much of the Javelin’s price is actual cost vs being a monopoly.

  • Pratai@piefed.ca
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    3 days ago

    I’m guessing the asshole that downvoted this either manufactures Javelin rockets, or the assholes that fire them.

  • PugJesus@piefed.social
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    3 days ago

    War is a waste. Eisenhower had many flaws, but he was spot-on when he said:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

    This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5]

    Sometimes, there’s no other way to deal with fascists and imperialists. But fuck, that just means that fascists and imperialists have doubled the waste that they would’ve created if they’d just kept to themselves, the stupid fucks.

    • Mirror Giraffe@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      And it’s not only about weaponry. Every single time we have to halt progression to fight racism, capitalist policies, lgbt-phobia etc, those are calories that could’ve been used to remove famine, inequality, violence and turn this here globe into a fucking utopia.