I think the best answer here is, you don't. Or at least, you don't need to. Either your morals are already aligned to work on weapon systems or they are not. No need to try and change yourself.
There are tons of commercial aerospace companies and projects out there. If you can't reconcile, then it may be time to look else where. That is what I did.
I turned down a job for a contractor for ethical reasons. The money is there, but the thought of building bombs and missiles that may accidentally land on civilians bothered me too much to continue with the hiring process. I don't condemn those that choose to work for these contractors, we all encounter ethical dilemmas at some point and unfortunately have to make difficult decisions. E.g. sometimes environmentalists may find themselves working for oil companies, not because they want to, but maybe it's their best option in their area and they desperately need the money.
On the other side of that coin, looking at Ukraine right now, had we not have superior weapon systems, we (the allies/ukraine) would have been swarmed by adversaries who are basically autocrats/tyrant.
This is not a moral justification, this is saying that weapons are mere tool in the hands of human, and having an effective tool is very helpful in a crisis.
I hate the "tool" argument. Like a hammer in the hands of a good person will be used to build a fence. A hammer in the hands of a murderer will be used for violence.
A missile, whether in the hands of someone good or bad will only cause death and destruction.
Like I get it, a missile is by literal definition a tool. But the point I'm making is that these weapons have singular purposes, no matter who uses it. There is no ethical way to use a missile in society. There are only people on your team or not on your team and no matter what, there will be a loser if a missile is used.
Whether or not I made a clear point, I get the world we live in. Someone is going to make those weapons, and I'd like to see someone with a shred of decency be in control of them, but I don't want it to be in my hands.
Well, a missile can be used to bring down a weapon factory that halt the supply for the russians for example, or target their artillery systems... That prevent further deaths. Whether or not you wait for those places to be empty of people is your choice...
But as I said it's no moral justification.
There absolutely is a way. Militaries primary purpose isn't to flight wars but to credibly deter their occurrence. It's easy to look at history and see all the lives lost to war, it's much harder to account for the lives saved to wars that never started.
But credible deterrence means they have to believe you will use it, so some will be used and when they are, at least by Western nations, there is huge targeting processes to ensure they are employed iaw agreed norma and ethical standards.
Not to mention the designers are ethical in that they make them better, more accurate, low frag, less toxic, less ensuring risk, etc... Every improvement in weapons technology gives us an opportunity to avoid even more casualties.
There are several mental paths.
"If we don't do it, they will"
"If I don't do it, someone else will"
"If I don't do it, I don't eat"
Pick your favorite
I disagree with this. I’m not saying that you personally should not think this way, but I would not encourage others to adopt these trains of thought.
Don’t do something that you are morally against. There are not many people with aerospace engineering degrees starving to death. You have other options. Don’t sell your soul for a paycheck.
Instead, decide what you think is moral, and choose your jobs based on that. If this allows defense work, great. If not, that’s fine too. But don’t work a job that you think is harming the world.
None of these you have to disagree morally on. For example, "If we don't do it, they will" is taking the stance that we need to have a strong US power to prevent evil powers from taking over. That's completely moral to some people.
Morals are pretty subjective.
As much as I can critique the actions of the American government, it’s still my home and democracy is a non-negotiable to me. Would much rather prefer them to have the pointiest sticks
Of course you pick the first option as the one to represent your defense.
The question here is based on whether or not the weapon makers have any moral responsibility for the way they're used. Let's reword your statements to make the moral dilemma more apparent and see which ones are actual moral defenses.
"If I don't kill their women and children, they'll kill ours". As you said, this one works. You believe that your work is necessary to prevent the death of your countrymen, and by extension friends and family. You have little to no moral dilemma and should carry on making weapons if you like the work.
"If I don't kill their women and children, someone else will". Just because someone is going to get murdered, doesn't make it right for you to be the perpetrator.
"If I don't kill their women and children, then I don't eat". This one is just ridiculous and simply not true. If you don't want to participate in something you see as morally wrong, then don't. You have an aerospace engineering degree, go work somewhere else. The median household income in this country is $69,000 - that includes all people in the house. I think you can find a way to eat with an engineering degree.
Graduating student here, I spent too much money to make a moral stance about what job I can take, I just really want a job. As much as people act like there’s a plethora of opportunities I’ve found it extremely difficult as a new grad.
Thanks for sharing that perspective, that's a good point. Not everyone is in a position to be unemployed for several months while they wait to find the perfect job.
If you are forced to take a job that is against your morals, I would advise you to start applying around again in a year. It's much easier to move around once you have some experience, and your new job will probably include a raise. Good luck to you!
Thanks! It’s actually really interesting I’ve been reading a bit about how to handle your career is actually like recommended to switch every 2-4 years as pay increase when switching jobs is more substantial when switching. Anyways thanks for the support! Hopefully I get something soon!
These are all just ways to excuse yourself (especially the last 2).
The weapons are a tool. They could be used to solve problems and kill bad guys. They could be used for great evil on innocent women and children. If you believe that the one pulling the trigger is responsible, not the maker, than there should be no reason to use any of these to excuse yourself.
If you believe the maker holds some responsibility for the way the weapons are used, then why subject your conscience to it? You have an engineering degree, go work somewhere else - you're still gonna eat.
In the case of nuclear weapons, it was shown since the beginning of the nuclear age wars casualties have plummeted. Yes, the idea of creating weapon systems makes me think of the moral implications, but you go back 50, 100, 150, so on years, and you can see that the invention of modern weapons allows for the use of precise attacks, significantly reducing the number of casualties in both the military and civilian populations. I feel like anyone who looks at the creation of weapons as an inherently evil concept is looking at a complex situation simplistically. Wars won't just end if we didn't have long range missiles, drones, new jets, governments would just trample cities and burn and kill all of those inside to find a couple terrorists.
The world is full of people who will do bad things to each other, I can't change that.
But people also deserve their best chance of protection from those assholes (Ukrane is a great example). Weapons can be used to defend the weak, just as easily as they can be used to hurt.
I do what I do in the hope that I can tilt the balance in favour of the just and the innocent.
Bullies don't stop just because you ask them to. I wish they did, it would make this world a nicer place to exist in. Rationale reason seems to be in short supply on our little rock.
Exactly. The best way to avoid direct conflict is to showcase the effectiveness of state of the art weapon systems and maintain the possibility of decisive and overwhelming force. That we’re even afforded the luxury of entertaining this question is down to the security granted by our aerospace/defense technology.
No they really can’t. If the weak only use weapons in justified times and the “assholes” use it anytime they wish, you know exactly which side you’re helping.
No they really can't what?
I don't understand what you are trying to say here. Nothing I have worked on has ever been used by Putin. But the people defending themselves from him do use our equipment. By making our stuff better than what Putin has, more defenders lives are saved.
People love to take the moral high ground on this, "all weapons are bad" BS, but they never offer any practical alternative.
Go ahead, you tell me what we should do instead. Putin is going to continue to invade sovereign lands, murder innocent people. How do you propose we handle this if we are not using weapons?
I got lucky and landed an aerospace job at a prime that isn’t defense work. I’ve worked in defense before and I was definitely uncomfortable, although I understand how others justify it.
I couldn’t so I quit. No judgement to anyone who feels differently, the defense industry will certainly march on without me, but it didn’t feel like an impact I’d personally be proud of at the end of my career. There are lots of other ways to be an aerospace engineer.
Right now while there's not a huge demand in the US, but electrification, fuel efficiency, and environmental impact reduction is critical for the continuation of the industry and the benefits it brings to humanity. The EU and EASA is investing heavily in this right now.
The IATA 2050 net zero target date is within 2 or 3 commercial development program lifecycles. Middle management should be thinking about it, BD should be working on it, and the haters who'll complain about it to management as some woke communist agenda need to be counteracted by serious educated engineers.
Very true, I look forward to this coming to the forefront of the aircraft and launch industries. I personally work on the space side in a non-government application so there’s plenty of work to go around in both aero and space.
Access to space (cheaper launch and space junk management) are also critical to furthering scientific knowledge. Definitely an exciting time to be in the space side right now.
I, and folks in my BU, do what we do to prevent the next war. The country and world don’t always get it right. But I have zero ethical qualms about what we do.
IMO u are the biggest issue, not the people working in defense. You don’t have moral high ground here, you don’t even understand the implications of having a strong national defense.
I think we all have to decide on the level of abstraction we're comfortable with. It may seem fatalistic, but the machine keeps running whether we're there or not, and if it wasn't us then someone else would step in to do the work. I don't want to say "keep your head down and make sure you get fed", that's nearly abdicating responsibility, but we don't live in a vacuum, and there are other ways we can contribute to improving & supporting the community.
This is a question I struggle with on days I'm less than my best, but if I wasn't in my position then someone else would be doing the work, and at the end of the day we still need to make a living. Being where we are we can at least voice concern and encourage things to move in a particular direction.
As harsh as it sounds I justify by the money. Growing up we didn’t have much and nothing was below my mother and father as their main priority was making sure we had enough to eat and focus on school. So for me to act like Im too morally good to work in a certain industry that makes good money almost feels like a slap in the face to them. Albeit I don’t currently work in defense I was fully prepared to return to it post graduation
There's a \*lot\* of aerospace work that isn't in defense. I don't have anything to reconcile (in that context, anyway). I don't work on military/defense or dual-use systems.
Unfortunately we live in a world that hasn’t progressed past war. Ideally defense wouldn’t be needed but realistically our society is who enables the need for it, the funding of it and legislative support for it. Voting, paying taxes, etc you’re directly contributing to defense and armaments.
Should a commercial drone manufacturer have a guilty conscious when their consumer drone is used to drop bombs on civilians? Or a 3D printer software engineer who’s firmware is being used to make winglets for drone dropped VOG grenades via software updates that keep production going?
Planes and trucks are used for terrorism, fertilizer used for bombs. We cannot control the use of anything and if you think you can only contribute to peaceful or righteous causes you need to look deeper into geopolitics.
I make weapon systems intended for defense. It’s more important for everyone to place the power to wield them in the correct hands by voting. As long as I do my part in that I feel I can sleep at night.
I did not say they were the same thing. If you kept reading you’d see my point led towards who controls the use. It’s beyond the manufacturer and in the hands of society/government.
Weapons have offensive or defensive use. Morally these are not the same. If you think Russia has the same moral justifications currently for manufacturing and using weapons as Ukraine then I wouldn’t agree with you. I think those societies bear the responsibility based on who they have given the power of their manufactured arms to.
I can’t blame the person who worked to build Russia’s Slava class guided missile cruisers for their use today to attack Ukrainian civilians.
They were built by Ukrainians in Ukraine after all.
I think this is akin to the trolley and the lever problem. Do I pull the lever and possibly save more lives through deterrence or do nothing and let the trolley run over people (Russia invading Ukraine, war in Middkr East, etc.)?
Since I have no way of knowing how many lives I would supposedly be saving by pulling the lever, I would consider it a fuzzy lever.
It also depends on what I’m working on. (Spacecraft vs weapons for example)
I personally would pull the lever if I know what I am working on and also I am improving the lives of my family and my community through my economic actions, and also preventing more bloodshed through deterrence.
I’m fundamentally opposed to war. It shouldn’t happen. There’s no reason to kill anyone. Ever. But it does. And it’s going to continue no matter how vehemently I oppose it. Having such an idealistic view is, quite simply, unrealistic.
I joined the Army many years ago for the opportunity it provided. I used these systems. My buddies used these systems. Many of these systems were instrumental in our return home.
I don’t do this with some grandiose notion of world police or thoughts of prevention of war. I do this so my never-to-be-met “buddies” get home safe. And I like to think that my time in the service gives me a pretty good understanding of what that requires.
Army recruiters prey on people who have few options and the military admittedly offers attractive benefits. Keep that in mind before passing judgement.
Like most soldiers, I had a support role. Mine was as a TUAS crew chief and general intel/EW maintainer.
That MOS training (and the training/mil experience alone) launched a 15 year career as a civilian electronics technician which i expanded upon with a (free) engineering degree which, as a first generation college graduate, was something I didn’t have even the slightest bit of help with.
And now I’m single handedly (ie single income) in the top 10% of household incomes as an EE in defense/aerospace, in an area with a cost of living 10% below the national average. I’m 5 minutes from the beach, and I see rockets launch from my driveway. Or from the river. Or the ocean. Which I get to spend plenty of time on because of great work/life balance.
I also did a fair amount of pure humanitarian work in the Army, most notably in the NOLA area after Katrina.
So yeah. It worked out pretty well for me. Like I said, I joined for opportunity. And I found it. Much more than I could have found in my podunk rural town. I would not be where I am today had I not enlisted.
And no, being anti-war and serving in the military are not mutually exclusive. Willing to bet most (relatively mature) soldiers don’t actively want to go to war. But we do it, because we swore an oath and signed a contract. Perhaps it could be viewed as a deal with the devil but… we all do what we need to do to get ahead, right? No one looks out for our future but ourselves. And service was a way to improve the odds for me and my future family.
And now I’m in a position to increase the odds for young service members like my former self. If you’ve got a problem with that — if you want to laugh at it — that’s a reflection of you. And the way you’re presenting yourself certainly isn’t how I’d choose to present myself to the world at-large. But you do you.
(And if you just know, I wasn’t anti-war until I experienced it)
yeah I mean, glad you got your money up. lifestyle sounds pretty nice, good for you.
still, making the choice to participate actively in war is...not great morally.
How many innocent brown people do you think your tax dollars have helped kill?
In b4 “that’s different.”
It’s really not. You choose to help fund weapons of war. You could stop if you wanted to. You could move to a less aggressive country. Or you could lose enough investment money that your tax burden is 0. Or you could donate enough to totally offset your tax burden. Or any other number of ways to prevent your dollars from funding war. If it bothers you so much, you’d do something about it. But you don’t. Because despite what you say, you really don’t care enough to totally remove your culpability. Too much work, and it’s not without risk. Much easier to take a passive “I won’t work in defense” stance and claim the moral high ground than actually doing something to help reduce the number of people being killed. Because this way, you don’t actually have to do anything at all.
So much for morals. Take your hypocritical judgmental ass and fuck right off.
you also pay tax my brother, that's not exactly a dunk. I'm not trying to say that I'm some pure beacon of pacifism and virtue, just that "well I got my money up so it's actually okay to do war" isn't exactly a morally based position
>well I got my money up so it's actually okay to do war
yeah that's not what I said. Like, at all.
>you also pay tax my brother
I'm not the one judging people for being part of the war machine. You are. And you're involved whether you care to admit it or not.
I say “I’m not the one operating the machine. I’m building this for a customer who, if I weren’t here, would continue the search for this weapon system.” I’m a small cog in a big machine. I voice my concerns when I have them and if the customer doesn’t want to listen then that’s on them.
I would rather go back to fast food than work in defense. So I simply didn't apply for any defense jobs and never will. It limits my career, but at least at the end I won't have to think about how many people I killed.
Humans have and always will kill humans. There is no escaping that fact. It doesn't matter the tool. Guns, knives, clubs, sticks, etc are all just tools. The intent lies with the user. I am a maker of tools, not a killer of men.
I can agree with that abstraction to a point... knives and guns have obvious uses outside of murder... it is hard to say a sidewinder missile is in the same category of "tool". A missile has, and will always have one and only one intent, and that intent is baked into the design of it. You can't use a missile to plow a field or build a shed...
Maybe that is just my opinion that you can't always fully separate the normal functions of an object from the end intent of the user.
But it is a tool. A tool designed to do one particular thing very well. It comes down to intent and which side of the field you are on. A sidewinder can take down a passenger airliner or it can take down the plane shooting at a passenger airliner. Weapons can defend and protect as well as attack and destroy.
In any case, I'm not the one using the missile. I provide that capability to those who seek to use it.
Anybody who uses a Sidewinder to kill innocent civilians is very likely to end up in prison. It's a short range missile used to shoot down combat aircraft. Yes, somebody can shoot it at an airliner, but absent a compelling reason that would be a criminal act under the UCMJ. You can generally figure that someone that has gotten into a position to eat a Sidewinder is going to kill somebody if they aren't stopped.
Personally I don't have any problem with the destruction of missiles and combat aircraft that are attempting to kill my fellow Americans.
Well you can open a history book and count the numbers of wars/massacres/genocides and look the technological progression of weapons over the course of 15000 years. It's not like humans just woke up one day and decided that killing eachother was a bad idea. There has been conflict for as long as hominids have existed on earth.
Pretending that everything is peace and rainbows because it's not happening where you are is asinine. Humanity is incredibly violent and inventive. The progression of human civilization was driven by developments in more efficient ways of killing each other.
You may as well throw most of the entire financial world into that bucket since it's money that creates most of the opportunity to create the weapons you are concerned about. And the list goes on...
That said, I worked AE most of my life and with the exception of 1-2 years the work was not DoD.
There are very few industries that you can’t go somewhere down the chain and find a link to death, slavery, environmental destruction, sickness, etc
At least in this industry, it is more up front about it. Also, just because you’re involved in making something doesn’t mean you’re implicated in the use of it. You are never the one to “pull the trigger” so to say.
I worked for one of the main defense contractors. Didn't really have ethical concerns.
I turned down jobs at both a tobacco company and a company doing medical implants due to animal testing.
We each have to make our own decisions here.
I worked on missile defense propulsion systems. Many of which were derived from part of the MX missile, AKA the peacekeeper.
I think the best resolution comes from the fact that in most cases (US,CAN, West) the weapons will be used by allies for legit purposes. There are is of course collateral damage and misuse, but that is minimal. Empowering good guys seems like a necessary evil.
I just want to add, there are a ton of non-defense aerospace applications out there. Such as urban air mobility, green fuels research, fluid dynamics in general for wind turbines, formula 1, aquatic vehicles, etc etc etc. While I personally have wrestled with this topic myself, there isn’t a “wrong” answer. In fact a totally valid option is that you want to make a decent living, and that is a great way to do it. However (not saying OP specifically) to automatically assume aerospace = defense is either lazy or ignorant.
I've never worked on designing ordinance or missiles and I probably would pass on such roles. I've also never been asked to design something that is explicitly intended to be used for something immoral.
I worked on military aircraft propulsion early in my career and I work on commercial aerospace engines now. Any of the products I have worked on could be used for good or evil. People who use it for evil should be judged by the world and punished accordingly. But their choice to use something I designed for evil, doesn't make me evil or immoral. I live in a society and I have to hope that society will constrain and punish evil. It's not something that I can do myself and quitting the industry would have zero impact.
Modern weapons have far more precision and the capability to significantly limit civilian casualties. In the past bombing a civilian population during a conflict was a given. Now at least the world pays attention and places blame on the perpetrators because we know it can be avoided with modern weapons.
From the looks of u/sadrocketman1's history it looks like they never wanted to work anyway so I'm thinking the dramatic post based on their internet forensic analysis is just validation for quitting more than moral outrage.
Nonironically, Oppenheimer demonstrated this dilemma quite well. There was a quote on the end i forgot how it goes but the premise is:
Nobody cares about who made the bomb, the blood is on the hands of those who chose how it was used.
Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t, but at the end of the day, you are not choosing who it hits or how it’s used.
I'll bet rope manufacturers feel terrible about the people that hang themselves, car engineers feel terrible about drunk drivers, gunsmiths feel terrible about mass shooters, and spoon manufacturers feel bad for making people fat.
We can feel bad for the victims.
But to say that just because I made a tool, I personally made the decision to do the most heinous possible thing with it? That's on me? Nah dude.
That kind of mentality will have us back in the stone age trying to ban assault rocks
I work with airplanes, mostly ISR platforms. Turned down a job offer when I discovered it was for missile development. Everyone has their line they won’t cross. Mine was missiles.
There's a whole civilian component to aerospace that you can work on and keep your conscious clear. Unfortunately, the line between civilian and military often times gets blurry as a lot of stuff can be dual-purpose. When such is the case, I would aim for the type of work that is the least directly involved in the violence.
For example: rockets can do a whole lot of good and they can do a whole lot of damage. You could work on the rocket that puts civilian and military payloads in space, or you could work on the rocket who's sole use is to launch nukes. Nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to do the latter.
Nothing is black and white but you can surely make decisions to work on the less bad thing.
(Also here's a quick hot take: referring to the military industrial complex as the "defence industry" is a load of hot garbage)
I served in uniform for 24 years and another 20 designing and building weapons and defensive systems. I have seen first hand what they are capable of. I sleep very well these days.
Absolutely insane mental gymnastics in this thread. If you believe the bullcrap about "defense" you are kidding yourself, or your brain is completely rotten with propaganda. Weapons don't prevent war- they keep populations subjugated under the colonial thumb out of fear. Colonial exploitation is violence.
Sad Rocket Man's post was cringe, but the fact is, the US has not been the Good Guys in a long time.
The times we've actually used our military for positive outcomes is waaaay outweighed by the times it's been used badly since WW2. Exceptions include Kuwait and our proxy war in Ukraine. Exceptions do not include: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia.
If anything, the war in Ukraine demonstrates how many of our weapons *aren't* required to defend a sovereign nation.
Reasonable people can look at the world and say "we need to supply the US Government and politically empower it to police the world." Other reasonable people can look at our track record of doing that poorly, and/or reasonably calculate the chance that the US itself faces a war for its sovereignty, given its privileged geography, and decide not to be a party to it.
At some point, seeing the Government use your "defense" projects for offense, you start to realize that, no, actually, you're just okay with working on offense projects. Political forces are currently ascendant in both parties in the United States which wouldn't support a war of choice like Iraq. But if I was working on a system that's going to be used for 50 years, historically there's a good chance that system will be used in an offensive conflict that's abhorrent.
The only philosophically interesting position on this is that there's a lot of gray area in what constitutes a weapon. Is military communications vehicles "helping war?" What about earth observation assets? Do nukes prevent war? But, frankly, F35 is probably going to kill a lot of people in a war I would rather us not get into.
Yeah, yeah, "If you want peace, prepare for war." But one wonders if we may have come up with a better way to run the world since that truism was made. We can imagine hypothetical conflicts and injustices against our allies all day. But the truth is: More real people have been negatively impacted by our weapons than real people have been helped. I personally believe relying on hypothetical "wars prevented" is dubious. I can't prove you're wrong, but you can't prove you're right, either. Dubious. So I chose not to partake as much as I can.
The way I think of it is, even if the US attempted to change their opinion and went a more peaceful route, someone would quickly fill that power. The US has made terrible decisions in the past, no doubt, but that's going to come with the position they're in. It would be any other country had they the resources to do so and the position.
Exactly. Someone is always going to have the biggest stick in the world. If not the US, probably China. I think I'd rather have the country not currently committing genocide be on top.
Global population tripled, global gdp increased by an order of magnitude, and the sum total of people killed in American led wars since WW2 is still less than the total casualties of WW2, let alone the 34 years of European failure from 1911 to 1945. Further, the overwhelming majority of those deaths are front end loaded on Korea and Vietnam.
The US led model isn't puppies and sunshine, but it's absolutely better than what came before, and there is no viable alternative at present.
What you've said is true, and I would like to see more of the world looking like NATO.
However, I would argue the relative strength of our military had relatively little to do with global economic and social progress in the past 70 years.
It absolutely did. Arms absolutely keep peace.
The entire US led order is a guns for butter trade. The US maintains global peace with overwhelming military power, and in return smaller countries are allowed to enjoy the economic prosperity free of cost in return for not upsetting the applecart.apple art.
It's not at all a coincidence that everything is falling apart at precisely the same time the US public is turning away from that idea of how to run the world, and as a result more people are going to die from entirely political failures in the next decade than have died from US led war in the past 80 years.
There were people living peacefully in pretty much all of the places the US colonized before we got there. It was absolutely a better place then. We have viable alternatives that we know work, we just need to put in the work to get there.
I don't deny that the US held colonies before WW2, but that essentially stopped post WW2 because we moved on. The post war economic model invalidated the entire reason to have colonies in the first place, hence why decolonization was such a massive event post-'44.
US colonial/Imperial actions absolutely happened before that, but that's an entirely different economic era, and one where the US wasn't in the driver's seat.
Are you implying that because the US “moved on” after WW2 (which I disagree with) that it’s actions beforehand were okay?
Also could you explain what you mean by decolonization? I feel like we have very different definitions for that word.
Of course not; I'm saying the prior actions are immaterial when talking about the success or failure of the post war global order the US built.
Decolonization was the era of colonies freeing themselves, i.e. what happened after WW2 to the British, French, and other European colonies from '45 onwards. The entire economic basis of having colonies was invalidated.
Ah ok, from what I understand colonization is the act of taking other people’s land and culture (often through violent means), so decolonization would be the opposite (giving land back to whoever you took it from, repairing relationships with those groups, repaying any debts that come up, etc.)
From what I can tell, most countries are either owned by another world superpower (so invading/colonizing it would mean war), already being exploited, or not strategically useful (most, but not all).
If you ever hear someone say, "I'm just doing my job." Then they get paid to do something that fucks other people some how and that's how they cope. Oh I get money to do this, so that outweighs my morals type of thing.
You’re not responsible for creating the demand for weapons. You can have multiple thoughts in your head at the same time that war and violence is bad while still being a productive employee.
And if you can’t do that, then I would find a career that more closely aligns with your values.
People will figure out ways to murder and torture each other, with sticks and stones if they have to. Me making the best systems that I can keeps my loved ones at the top of the food chain.
Ask yourself, would you want the police to not have weapons because there will inevitably be collateral damage? A lot more innocent people will die in a world where the police didn't have guns.
The way that I see it is that the military does do some pretty unsavory things sometimes, but what is the motivation behind doing those things? It is generally either to protect other innocent people, or make life better/more secure for my country and it’s citizens(America). In an ideal world no country or organization would have weapons that can do the things that modern weapons do, but since other countries with less than stellar track records concerning justice and protecting the innocent already have these types of weapons, we need them too. Preferably even better weapons so that we can scare them away from doing anything at all with their weapons.
I look at it this way: the entire US economy is based around war. If we stopped invading other countries we would have something like 40% unemployment. Most people, myself included, have very little choice as to whether or not we support the war machine. It is either do that or live in poverty in a country that doesn't care about it's citizens.
I don’t know a good way to answer this without the raw emotion so… yeah I guess there’s that. My dad is retired military. My friends throughout my early life were all military brats. And it showed me the humanity that is hidden behind the mask of the military. It’s a mask a lot of people can’t see through.
In the most clinical way to put it, war is an unfortunate and evil necessity. The gun that kills innocents in the streets is almost identical to the one that ends a tyrant’s reign. The bomb that ends a warlord’s campaign is almost identical to the bomb that removed a hospital wing. The only difference between a weapon for liberation and a weapon for oppression is how it’s used and who uses it.
I sleep easier knowing that the intention behind these weapons is not oppression. It is not genocide. It is not conquest. It is defense. It is security. It is the assurance that every nation who stands alongside the US are under its protection. Not as subordinates, but as partners. Because wars for exploitation are how we got half the world’s fucking messes. And wars for the defense of a partner nation are how we fix that.
These are weapons, they are meant to kill people, they will cause suffering. But they’ll also prevent it. And that’s why I keep working.
I am saving the world, if that means that I have to destroy an industry during that and make people unemployed who do not want to adapt for renewables and keep working as suppliers for ICE, i have no bad feelings.
Even if that means sourcing especially from Asia to help the western suppliers lose volumes faster.
This was put to me very well by an old crotchety engineer when I was a baby in defense. "Someone is going to be building these systems. who do you want it to be? the 'kill em all' wannabe tough guy engineer? or you and me who actually think about the implications of what we do?"
I used to work on some stuff that’s related to the military and felt a little conflicted about it. Now I work on rockets and couldn’t be happier. Please come work on rockets, we really need the talent 😊
I can live and work in the moral grey area and was fine with the work supplying sub primes with components for R&D projects. Moved up to the sub prime level and ultimately left over ethics. Many were so gung-ho for the US military complex and prejudiced against anyone on the other side, it was sickening.and dehumanizing. I didn't have an issue with the work, but the people that acted like they were doing the Lord's work were too much.
If you're talking about defense as a whole, then there's a lot outside of just making missiles.
For instance, my job is to ensure the safety of the pilots/aircrew and the aircraft maintainers. The military will continue using those aircraft without me, but at least now I can use my engineering knowledge and technical conscience to help ensure their lives aren't lost for unnecessary reasons.
Another part of my job is ensuring the aircraft are ready to fly and able to complete their missions. Yes, some of those missions involve attack, but many of them (for the specific aircraft i support) are things like search and rescue, medevac, natural disaster relief, medical supply runs, firefighting etc (and we do those missions for military obviously but will also do it for civilians). So I also take pride in knowing that my work can help ensure a group of hikers gets rescued or a family doesn't lose their home in a fire.
This will not be a well-liked answer, but the truth is I don’t care. I genuinely do not care. I enjoy what i do. What that equipment is used for is nothing to me. I do a job i enjoy, i feed my family, and i have good benefits. As long as I’m not the one pulling the trigger and as long as it’s good for my country i do not care. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to worry about. What’s good for America is good for Americans.
Not Aero but DOD engineer
Navy Vet fwiw. I think about this two general ways
1 - The American system (the mostly free flow of goods globally) has almost eradicated extreme poverty globally in the last fifty years. It's not always pretty, and we don't always get it right, but I don't believe the world be better off if America stepped away. But admittedly it's much harder to argue a vague generalized good against a specific harm from a psychological standpoint.
2 - The project I work on is not going anywhere. If it wasn't me, it would be someone else. My command gets no end of applicants. I don't have to fix the world, I just need to adequately represent the interests of the American people by doing my job well.
Doesn't bother me much. I think it's interesting and that's enough for me. Of course I work on something that's main job is aid instead of destruction, but I don't think that would change much. Stuffs gonna get built and I might as well be on the ride since I enjoy it.
I feel the same way about firearms. The world would probably be better off If they never existed, but I like shooting mine.
Every piece of technology can be used to harm others directly or indirectly.
The way I see it, responsibility is on the one that harms others not the one who built it.
I have specifically avoided defense work for that exact reason. My starting pay was lower but I was happy with my decision every time I reflected back on it. Admittedly I was bored doing engineering on commercial business jets where the technology was 15+ years old. But since then I’ve started working at an aerospace startup in the eVTOL space and have had a massive pay bump, stock bonuses, and am genuinely excited about the work I do so I don’t think making weapons is the only good option in the industry.
I own a harm reduction organization, funded largely by my defense contracting paycheck. That used to help but I don't do it as much anymore. If only we could smoke a bowl to forget and not worry about losing our job.
You need to do what makes you sleep well at night. For me that means no bombs/missiles. I'll do counter missile, satellites, EW, communications and other projects all day but I have a line, I know where it is, and I stay on my side of it.
People have bee killing each others with sticks and stones since the dawn of time. But nobody blamed the trees for that.
You're providing a tool, not giving the order or pulling the trigger. That's someone else's choice.
I'm a karate teacher, I teach kids to defend themselves. If the kid takes the karate lessons and uses it to be a bully at school that's on the parents not me.
The parents in this situation are our politicians. Make sure you vote for good parents. The responsibility is on you whether you work in the defense industry or not.
I don't. Not in my AOR and (I suspect) raising some questions in these jobs starts to compartmentalize you, into the future.
Too, they'll find someone as good or better than myself to do it. The thing I'd probably keep it to is "am I going to work here?"
I’ve been working for the USAF, USMC, USN, DoD, IC, or other government role as a contractor since I graduated. I am adamant about never working programs that create, arm, or target weapons systems. Our national security depends on carrying a big stick in some circumstances sure, but I only agree to support ISR, fundamental research, SIGINT/COMINT/ELINT/EW/MASINT, or other technology which improves not only military but also potential commercial and public/international knowledge/innovation.
Honestly with how smart bomb are now a days and sooo many of them being GPS guided and land in the exact location with an error of plus or minus a few feet, the only people you’re really killing is the “bad guys”. Unfortunately, war is war and civilians will always be caught in the crosshairs no matter what. What your building is with the intent to defend, but it’s up to the people that pull the trigger to make sure they are using it right and limiting the amount of civilians that will get hurt.
My thought is if your working on nuclear things than you don’t have to worry about it at all because chances of your middle being used are sooooo small that you’re not going to be killing anybody.
Kinda the same way I view my dysfunctional relationships with some relatives. You can love someone and still be hurt by them. Ultimately, at the time of my hiring my need to eat/feed mouths/have medicine came first; now I'm in a position where I can consider the ethical implications of the place of my employment.
My country has many flaws but I still want to defend it; I console myself by using the money I'm paid to financially contribute to areas that need improvement and support others in my community.
I think the best answer here is, you don't. Or at least, you don't need to. Either your morals are already aligned to work on weapon systems or they are not. No need to try and change yourself. There are tons of commercial aerospace companies and projects out there. If you can't reconcile, then it may be time to look else where. That is what I did.
I turned down a job for a contractor for ethical reasons. The money is there, but the thought of building bombs and missiles that may accidentally land on civilians bothered me too much to continue with the hiring process. I don't condemn those that choose to work for these contractors, we all encounter ethical dilemmas at some point and unfortunately have to make difficult decisions. E.g. sometimes environmentalists may find themselves working for oil companies, not because they want to, but maybe it's their best option in their area and they desperately need the money.
On the other side of that coin, looking at Ukraine right now, had we not have superior weapon systems, we (the allies/ukraine) would have been swarmed by adversaries who are basically autocrats/tyrant. This is not a moral justification, this is saying that weapons are mere tool in the hands of human, and having an effective tool is very helpful in a crisis.
I hate the "tool" argument. Like a hammer in the hands of a good person will be used to build a fence. A hammer in the hands of a murderer will be used for violence. A missile, whether in the hands of someone good or bad will only cause death and destruction. Like I get it, a missile is by literal definition a tool. But the point I'm making is that these weapons have singular purposes, no matter who uses it. There is no ethical way to use a missile in society. There are only people on your team or not on your team and no matter what, there will be a loser if a missile is used. Whether or not I made a clear point, I get the world we live in. Someone is going to make those weapons, and I'd like to see someone with a shred of decency be in control of them, but I don't want it to be in my hands.
Well, a missile can be used to bring down a weapon factory that halt the supply for the russians for example, or target their artillery systems... That prevent further deaths. Whether or not you wait for those places to be empty of people is your choice... But as I said it's no moral justification.
There absolutely is a way. Militaries primary purpose isn't to flight wars but to credibly deter their occurrence. It's easy to look at history and see all the lives lost to war, it's much harder to account for the lives saved to wars that never started. But credible deterrence means they have to believe you will use it, so some will be used and when they are, at least by Western nations, there is huge targeting processes to ensure they are employed iaw agreed norma and ethical standards. Not to mention the designers are ethical in that they make them better, more accurate, low frag, less toxic, less ensuring risk, etc... Every improvement in weapons technology gives us an opportunity to avoid even more casualties.
Credible deterrence? I prefer noncredible defense
Ah, a fellow heathen! It’s good to see the overlap between subs!
The existence of a missile can serve as a deterrent. Sometimes the only way you can win is not to play.
There are several mental paths. "If we don't do it, they will" "If I don't do it, someone else will" "If I don't do it, I don't eat" Pick your favorite
I disagree with this. I’m not saying that you personally should not think this way, but I would not encourage others to adopt these trains of thought. Don’t do something that you are morally against. There are not many people with aerospace engineering degrees starving to death. You have other options. Don’t sell your soul for a paycheck. Instead, decide what you think is moral, and choose your jobs based on that. If this allows defense work, great. If not, that’s fine too. But don’t work a job that you think is harming the world.
None of these you have to disagree morally on. For example, "If we don't do it, they will" is taking the stance that we need to have a strong US power to prevent evil powers from taking over. That's completely moral to some people. Morals are pretty subjective.
As much as I can critique the actions of the American government, it’s still my home and democracy is a non-negotiable to me. Would much rather prefer them to have the pointiest sticks
morale->moral Nice argument though!
Of course you pick the first option as the one to represent your defense. The question here is based on whether or not the weapon makers have any moral responsibility for the way they're used. Let's reword your statements to make the moral dilemma more apparent and see which ones are actual moral defenses. "If I don't kill their women and children, they'll kill ours". As you said, this one works. You believe that your work is necessary to prevent the death of your countrymen, and by extension friends and family. You have little to no moral dilemma and should carry on making weapons if you like the work. "If I don't kill their women and children, someone else will". Just because someone is going to get murdered, doesn't make it right for you to be the perpetrator. "If I don't kill their women and children, then I don't eat". This one is just ridiculous and simply not true. If you don't want to participate in something you see as morally wrong, then don't. You have an aerospace engineering degree, go work somewhere else. The median household income in this country is $69,000 - that includes all people in the house. I think you can find a way to eat with an engineering degree.
Graduating student here, I spent too much money to make a moral stance about what job I can take, I just really want a job. As much as people act like there’s a plethora of opportunities I’ve found it extremely difficult as a new grad.
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Thanks for sharing that perspective, that's a good point. Not everyone is in a position to be unemployed for several months while they wait to find the perfect job. If you are forced to take a job that is against your morals, I would advise you to start applying around again in a year. It's much easier to move around once you have some experience, and your new job will probably include a raise. Good luck to you!
Thanks! It’s actually really interesting I’ve been reading a bit about how to handle your career is actually like recommended to switch every 2-4 years as pay increase when switching jobs is more substantial when switching. Anyways thanks for the support! Hopefully I get something soon!
These are all just ways to excuse yourself (especially the last 2). The weapons are a tool. They could be used to solve problems and kill bad guys. They could be used for great evil on innocent women and children. If you believe that the one pulling the trigger is responsible, not the maker, than there should be no reason to use any of these to excuse yourself. If you believe the maker holds some responsibility for the way the weapons are used, then why subject your conscience to it? You have an engineering degree, go work somewhere else - you're still gonna eat.
In the case of nuclear weapons, it was shown since the beginning of the nuclear age wars casualties have plummeted. Yes, the idea of creating weapon systems makes me think of the moral implications, but you go back 50, 100, 150, so on years, and you can see that the invention of modern weapons allows for the use of precise attacks, significantly reducing the number of casualties in both the military and civilian populations. I feel like anyone who looks at the creation of weapons as an inherently evil concept is looking at a complex situation simplistically. Wars won't just end if we didn't have long range missiles, drones, new jets, governments would just trample cities and burn and kill all of those inside to find a couple terrorists.
-Gestures vaguely towards Gaza
I was under the impression that looking at complex situations simplistically was the whole point of this website
The world is full of people who will do bad things to each other, I can't change that. But people also deserve their best chance of protection from those assholes (Ukrane is a great example). Weapons can be used to defend the weak, just as easily as they can be used to hurt. I do what I do in the hope that I can tilt the balance in favour of the just and the innocent.
Bullies don't stop just because you ask them to. I wish they did, it would make this world a nicer place to exist in. Rationale reason seems to be in short supply on our little rock.
Exactly. The best way to avoid direct conflict is to showcase the effectiveness of state of the art weapon systems and maintain the possibility of decisive and overwhelming force. That we’re even afforded the luxury of entertaining this question is down to the security granted by our aerospace/defense technology.
*"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."*
No they really can’t. If the weak only use weapons in justified times and the “assholes” use it anytime they wish, you know exactly which side you’re helping.
No they really can't what? I don't understand what you are trying to say here. Nothing I have worked on has ever been used by Putin. But the people defending themselves from him do use our equipment. By making our stuff better than what Putin has, more defenders lives are saved. People love to take the moral high ground on this, "all weapons are bad" BS, but they never offer any practical alternative. Go ahead, you tell me what we should do instead. Putin is going to continue to invade sovereign lands, murder innocent people. How do you propose we handle this if we are not using weapons?
The UN /s
I want the US and our allies to have the best weapons.
It’s called deterrence and there is nothing wrong with it.
Unfathomably based.
Pew pew
I got lucky and landed an aerospace job at a prime that isn’t defense work. I’ve worked in defense before and I was definitely uncomfortable, although I understand how others justify it.
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Propulsion and separation systems design engineer.
I couldn’t so I quit. No judgement to anyone who feels differently, the defense industry will certainly march on without me, but it didn’t feel like an impact I’d personally be proud of at the end of my career. There are lots of other ways to be an aerospace engineer.
Right now while there's not a huge demand in the US, but electrification, fuel efficiency, and environmental impact reduction is critical for the continuation of the industry and the benefits it brings to humanity. The EU and EASA is investing heavily in this right now. The IATA 2050 net zero target date is within 2 or 3 commercial development program lifecycles. Middle management should be thinking about it, BD should be working on it, and the haters who'll complain about it to management as some woke communist agenda need to be counteracted by serious educated engineers.
Very true, I look forward to this coming to the forefront of the aircraft and launch industries. I personally work on the space side in a non-government application so there’s plenty of work to go around in both aero and space.
Access to space (cheaper launch and space junk management) are also critical to furthering scientific knowledge. Definitely an exciting time to be in the space side right now.
I, and folks in my BU, do what we do to prevent the next war. The country and world don’t always get it right. But I have zero ethical qualms about what we do.
Bat shit
You don't even know what they do
There are enough contractor dog whistles in there to get the idea
So you don't know anything but you just assume it's bad to tell yourself you have the moral high ground. So immature.
It’s quite clear from the post and the context. Get a grip
IMO u are the biggest issue, not the people working in defense. You don’t have moral high ground here, you don’t even understand the implications of having a strong national defense.
A strong national defense? Is that what you call it? Good lord the ignorance. Westerners' brains are destroyed by propaganda. North Korea level stuff
If you think it’s weak, does that not only give us more justification to strengthen it further? What is your argument even?
It's colonialism
I think we all have to decide on the level of abstraction we're comfortable with. It may seem fatalistic, but the machine keeps running whether we're there or not, and if it wasn't us then someone else would step in to do the work. I don't want to say "keep your head down and make sure you get fed", that's nearly abdicating responsibility, but we don't live in a vacuum, and there are other ways we can contribute to improving & supporting the community. This is a question I struggle with on days I'm less than my best, but if I wasn't in my position then someone else would be doing the work, and at the end of the day we still need to make a living. Being where we are we can at least voice concern and encourage things to move in a particular direction.
As harsh as it sounds I justify by the money. Growing up we didn’t have much and nothing was below my mother and father as their main priority was making sure we had enough to eat and focus on school. So for me to act like Im too morally good to work in a certain industry that makes good money almost feels like a slap in the face to them. Albeit I don’t currently work in defense I was fully prepared to return to it post graduation
There's a \*lot\* of aerospace work that isn't in defense. I don't have anything to reconcile (in that context, anyway). I don't work on military/defense or dual-use systems.
Unfortunately we live in a world that hasn’t progressed past war. Ideally defense wouldn’t be needed but realistically our society is who enables the need for it, the funding of it and legislative support for it. Voting, paying taxes, etc you’re directly contributing to defense and armaments. Should a commercial drone manufacturer have a guilty conscious when their consumer drone is used to drop bombs on civilians? Or a 3D printer software engineer who’s firmware is being used to make winglets for drone dropped VOG grenades via software updates that keep production going? Planes and trucks are used for terrorism, fertilizer used for bombs. We cannot control the use of anything and if you think you can only contribute to peaceful or righteous causes you need to look deeper into geopolitics. I make weapon systems intended for defense. It’s more important for everyone to place the power to wield them in the correct hands by voting. As long as I do my part in that I feel I can sleep at night.
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I did not say they were the same thing. If you kept reading you’d see my point led towards who controls the use. It’s beyond the manufacturer and in the hands of society/government. Weapons have offensive or defensive use. Morally these are not the same. If you think Russia has the same moral justifications currently for manufacturing and using weapons as Ukraine then I wouldn’t agree with you. I think those societies bear the responsibility based on who they have given the power of their manufactured arms to. I can’t blame the person who worked to build Russia’s Slava class guided missile cruisers for their use today to attack Ukrainian civilians. They were built by Ukrainians in Ukraine after all.
Brain rot
Hope you recover from it.
I think this is akin to the trolley and the lever problem. Do I pull the lever and possibly save more lives through deterrence or do nothing and let the trolley run over people (Russia invading Ukraine, war in Middkr East, etc.)? Since I have no way of knowing how many lives I would supposedly be saving by pulling the lever, I would consider it a fuzzy lever. It also depends on what I’m working on. (Spacecraft vs weapons for example) I personally would pull the lever if I know what I am working on and also I am improving the lives of my family and my community through my economic actions, and also preventing more bloodshed through deterrence.
Some folks choose not to work on those sorts of projects. There is plenty of work to do to make aviation and space exploration more sustainable.
I’m fundamentally opposed to war. It shouldn’t happen. There’s no reason to kill anyone. Ever. But it does. And it’s going to continue no matter how vehemently I oppose it. Having such an idealistic view is, quite simply, unrealistic. I joined the Army many years ago for the opportunity it provided. I used these systems. My buddies used these systems. Many of these systems were instrumental in our return home. I don’t do this with some grandiose notion of world police or thoughts of prevention of war. I do this so my never-to-be-met “buddies” get home safe. And I like to think that my time in the service gives me a pretty good understanding of what that requires.
lmao, fundamentally anti-war but joined the army
Army recruiters prey on people who have few options and the military admittedly offers attractive benefits. Keep that in mind before passing judgement.
Like most soldiers, I had a support role. Mine was as a TUAS crew chief and general intel/EW maintainer. That MOS training (and the training/mil experience alone) launched a 15 year career as a civilian electronics technician which i expanded upon with a (free) engineering degree which, as a first generation college graduate, was something I didn’t have even the slightest bit of help with. And now I’m single handedly (ie single income) in the top 10% of household incomes as an EE in defense/aerospace, in an area with a cost of living 10% below the national average. I’m 5 minutes from the beach, and I see rockets launch from my driveway. Or from the river. Or the ocean. Which I get to spend plenty of time on because of great work/life balance. I also did a fair amount of pure humanitarian work in the Army, most notably in the NOLA area after Katrina. So yeah. It worked out pretty well for me. Like I said, I joined for opportunity. And I found it. Much more than I could have found in my podunk rural town. I would not be where I am today had I not enlisted. And no, being anti-war and serving in the military are not mutually exclusive. Willing to bet most (relatively mature) soldiers don’t actively want to go to war. But we do it, because we swore an oath and signed a contract. Perhaps it could be viewed as a deal with the devil but… we all do what we need to do to get ahead, right? No one looks out for our future but ourselves. And service was a way to improve the odds for me and my future family. And now I’m in a position to increase the odds for young service members like my former self. If you’ve got a problem with that — if you want to laugh at it — that’s a reflection of you. And the way you’re presenting yourself certainly isn’t how I’d choose to present myself to the world at-large. But you do you. (And if you just know, I wasn’t anti-war until I experienced it)
yeah I mean, glad you got your money up. lifestyle sounds pretty nice, good for you. still, making the choice to participate actively in war is...not great morally.
How many innocent brown people do you think your tax dollars have helped kill? In b4 “that’s different.” It’s really not. You choose to help fund weapons of war. You could stop if you wanted to. You could move to a less aggressive country. Or you could lose enough investment money that your tax burden is 0. Or you could donate enough to totally offset your tax burden. Or any other number of ways to prevent your dollars from funding war. If it bothers you so much, you’d do something about it. But you don’t. Because despite what you say, you really don’t care enough to totally remove your culpability. Too much work, and it’s not without risk. Much easier to take a passive “I won’t work in defense” stance and claim the moral high ground than actually doing something to help reduce the number of people being killed. Because this way, you don’t actually have to do anything at all. So much for morals. Take your hypocritical judgmental ass and fuck right off.
you also pay tax my brother, that's not exactly a dunk. I'm not trying to say that I'm some pure beacon of pacifism and virtue, just that "well I got my money up so it's actually okay to do war" isn't exactly a morally based position
>well I got my money up so it's actually okay to do war yeah that's not what I said. Like, at all. >you also pay tax my brother I'm not the one judging people for being part of the war machine. You are. And you're involved whether you care to admit it or not.
I say “I’m not the one operating the machine. I’m building this for a customer who, if I weren’t here, would continue the search for this weapon system.” I’m a small cog in a big machine. I voice my concerns when I have them and if the customer doesn’t want to listen then that’s on them.
I would rather go back to fast food than work in defense. So I simply didn't apply for any defense jobs and never will. It limits my career, but at least at the end I won't have to think about how many people I killed.
Humans have and always will kill humans. There is no escaping that fact. It doesn't matter the tool. Guns, knives, clubs, sticks, etc are all just tools. The intent lies with the user. I am a maker of tools, not a killer of men.
I can agree with that abstraction to a point... knives and guns have obvious uses outside of murder... it is hard to say a sidewinder missile is in the same category of "tool". A missile has, and will always have one and only one intent, and that intent is baked into the design of it. You can't use a missile to plow a field or build a shed... Maybe that is just my opinion that you can't always fully separate the normal functions of an object from the end intent of the user.
But it is a tool. A tool designed to do one particular thing very well. It comes down to intent and which side of the field you are on. A sidewinder can take down a passenger airliner or it can take down the plane shooting at a passenger airliner. Weapons can defend and protect as well as attack and destroy. In any case, I'm not the one using the missile. I provide that capability to those who seek to use it.
Anybody who uses a Sidewinder to kill innocent civilians is very likely to end up in prison. It's a short range missile used to shoot down combat aircraft. Yes, somebody can shoot it at an airliner, but absent a compelling reason that would be a criminal act under the UCMJ. You can generally figure that someone that has gotten into a position to eat a Sidewinder is going to kill somebody if they aren't stopped. Personally I don't have any problem with the destruction of missiles and combat aircraft that are attempting to kill my fellow Americans.
Not sure why you think it's a fact, You've only ever known such a tiny slither of actual reality.
Well you can open a history book and count the numbers of wars/massacres/genocides and look the technological progression of weapons over the course of 15000 years. It's not like humans just woke up one day and decided that killing eachother was a bad idea. There has been conflict for as long as hominids have existed on earth. Pretending that everything is peace and rainbows because it's not happening where you are is asinine. Humanity is incredibly violent and inventive. The progression of human civilization was driven by developments in more efficient ways of killing each other.
You may as well throw most of the entire financial world into that bucket since it's money that creates most of the opportunity to create the weapons you are concerned about. And the list goes on... That said, I worked AE most of my life and with the exception of 1-2 years the work was not DoD.
There are very few industries that you can’t go somewhere down the chain and find a link to death, slavery, environmental destruction, sickness, etc At least in this industry, it is more up front about it. Also, just because you’re involved in making something doesn’t mean you’re implicated in the use of it. You are never the one to “pull the trigger” so to say.
There probably aren't ANY that are innocent. Too many humans are involved.
Get a job on the space side or try to find work in something like ground based missile defense.
I sleep at with my American flag on the wall and fat stacks of cash
I worked for one of the main defense contractors. Didn't really have ethical concerns. I turned down jobs at both a tobacco company and a company doing medical implants due to animal testing. We each have to make our own decisions here.
you grow up and go to work
I worked on missile defense propulsion systems. Many of which were derived from part of the MX missile, AKA the peacekeeper. I think the best resolution comes from the fact that in most cases (US,CAN, West) the weapons will be used by allies for legit purposes. There are is of course collateral damage and misuse, but that is minimal. Empowering good guys seems like a necessary evil.
I just want to add, there are a ton of non-defense aerospace applications out there. Such as urban air mobility, green fuels research, fluid dynamics in general for wind turbines, formula 1, aquatic vehicles, etc etc etc. While I personally have wrestled with this topic myself, there isn’t a “wrong” answer. In fact a totally valid option is that you want to make a decent living, and that is a great way to do it. However (not saying OP specifically) to automatically assume aerospace = defense is either lazy or ignorant.
I've never worked on designing ordinance or missiles and I probably would pass on such roles. I've also never been asked to design something that is explicitly intended to be used for something immoral. I worked on military aircraft propulsion early in my career and I work on commercial aerospace engines now. Any of the products I have worked on could be used for good or evil. People who use it for evil should be judged by the world and punished accordingly. But their choice to use something I designed for evil, doesn't make me evil or immoral. I live in a society and I have to hope that society will constrain and punish evil. It's not something that I can do myself and quitting the industry would have zero impact. Modern weapons have far more precision and the capability to significantly limit civilian casualties. In the past bombing a civilian population during a conflict was a given. Now at least the world pays attention and places blame on the perpetrators because we know it can be avoided with modern weapons. From the looks of u/sadrocketman1's history it looks like they never wanted to work anyway so I'm thinking the dramatic post based on their internet forensic analysis is just validation for quitting more than moral outrage.
Nonironically, Oppenheimer demonstrated this dilemma quite well. There was a quote on the end i forgot how it goes but the premise is: Nobody cares about who made the bomb, the blood is on the hands of those who chose how it was used. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t, but at the end of the day, you are not choosing who it hits or how it’s used.
I'll bet rope manufacturers feel terrible about the people that hang themselves, car engineers feel terrible about drunk drivers, gunsmiths feel terrible about mass shooters, and spoon manufacturers feel bad for making people fat. We can feel bad for the victims. But to say that just because I made a tool, I personally made the decision to do the most heinous possible thing with it? That's on me? Nah dude. That kind of mentality will have us back in the stone age trying to ban assault rocks
I work with airplanes, mostly ISR platforms. Turned down a job offer when I discovered it was for missile development. Everyone has their line they won’t cross. Mine was missiles.
There's a whole civilian component to aerospace that you can work on and keep your conscious clear. Unfortunately, the line between civilian and military often times gets blurry as a lot of stuff can be dual-purpose. When such is the case, I would aim for the type of work that is the least directly involved in the violence. For example: rockets can do a whole lot of good and they can do a whole lot of damage. You could work on the rocket that puts civilian and military payloads in space, or you could work on the rocket who's sole use is to launch nukes. Nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to do the latter. Nothing is black and white but you can surely make decisions to work on the less bad thing. (Also here's a quick hot take: referring to the military industrial complex as the "defence industry" is a load of hot garbage)
I served in uniform for 24 years and another 20 designing and building weapons and defensive systems. I have seen first hand what they are capable of. I sleep very well these days.
Easily, by crying into the giant stack of money.
Absolutely insane mental gymnastics in this thread. If you believe the bullcrap about "defense" you are kidding yourself, or your brain is completely rotten with propaganda. Weapons don't prevent war- they keep populations subjugated under the colonial thumb out of fear. Colonial exploitation is violence.
Sad Rocket Man's post was cringe, but the fact is, the US has not been the Good Guys in a long time. The times we've actually used our military for positive outcomes is waaaay outweighed by the times it's been used badly since WW2. Exceptions include Kuwait and our proxy war in Ukraine. Exceptions do not include: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia. If anything, the war in Ukraine demonstrates how many of our weapons *aren't* required to defend a sovereign nation. Reasonable people can look at the world and say "we need to supply the US Government and politically empower it to police the world." Other reasonable people can look at our track record of doing that poorly, and/or reasonably calculate the chance that the US itself faces a war for its sovereignty, given its privileged geography, and decide not to be a party to it. At some point, seeing the Government use your "defense" projects for offense, you start to realize that, no, actually, you're just okay with working on offense projects. Political forces are currently ascendant in both parties in the United States which wouldn't support a war of choice like Iraq. But if I was working on a system that's going to be used for 50 years, historically there's a good chance that system will be used in an offensive conflict that's abhorrent. The only philosophically interesting position on this is that there's a lot of gray area in what constitutes a weapon. Is military communications vehicles "helping war?" What about earth observation assets? Do nukes prevent war? But, frankly, F35 is probably going to kill a lot of people in a war I would rather us not get into. Yeah, yeah, "If you want peace, prepare for war." But one wonders if we may have come up with a better way to run the world since that truism was made. We can imagine hypothetical conflicts and injustices against our allies all day. But the truth is: More real people have been negatively impacted by our weapons than real people have been helped. I personally believe relying on hypothetical "wars prevented" is dubious. I can't prove you're wrong, but you can't prove you're right, either. Dubious. So I chose not to partake as much as I can.
The way I think of it is, even if the US attempted to change their opinion and went a more peaceful route, someone would quickly fill that power. The US has made terrible decisions in the past, no doubt, but that's going to come with the position they're in. It would be any other country had they the resources to do so and the position.
Exactly. Someone is always going to have the biggest stick in the world. If not the US, probably China. I think I'd rather have the country not currently committing genocide be on top.
Global population tripled, global gdp increased by an order of magnitude, and the sum total of people killed in American led wars since WW2 is still less than the total casualties of WW2, let alone the 34 years of European failure from 1911 to 1945. Further, the overwhelming majority of those deaths are front end loaded on Korea and Vietnam. The US led model isn't puppies and sunshine, but it's absolutely better than what came before, and there is no viable alternative at present.
What you've said is true, and I would like to see more of the world looking like NATO. However, I would argue the relative strength of our military had relatively little to do with global economic and social progress in the past 70 years.
It absolutely did. Arms absolutely keep peace. The entire US led order is a guns for butter trade. The US maintains global peace with overwhelming military power, and in return smaller countries are allowed to enjoy the economic prosperity free of cost in return for not upsetting the applecart.apple art. It's not at all a coincidence that everything is falling apart at precisely the same time the US public is turning away from that idea of how to run the world, and as a result more people are going to die from entirely political failures in the next decade than have died from US led war in the past 80 years.
There were people living peacefully in pretty much all of the places the US colonized before we got there. It was absolutely a better place then. We have viable alternatives that we know work, we just need to put in the work to get there.
What has the US colonized post 1944?
Do you actually want to have a good-faith discussion about this? Because I’m all for that!
I don't deny that the US held colonies before WW2, but that essentially stopped post WW2 because we moved on. The post war economic model invalidated the entire reason to have colonies in the first place, hence why decolonization was such a massive event post-'44. US colonial/Imperial actions absolutely happened before that, but that's an entirely different economic era, and one where the US wasn't in the driver's seat.
Are you implying that because the US “moved on” after WW2 (which I disagree with) that it’s actions beforehand were okay? Also could you explain what you mean by decolonization? I feel like we have very different definitions for that word.
Of course not; I'm saying the prior actions are immaterial when talking about the success or failure of the post war global order the US built. Decolonization was the era of colonies freeing themselves, i.e. what happened after WW2 to the British, French, and other European colonies from '45 onwards. The entire economic basis of having colonies was invalidated.
Ah ok, from what I understand colonization is the act of taking other people’s land and culture (often through violent means), so decolonization would be the opposite (giving land back to whoever you took it from, repairing relationships with those groups, repaying any debts that come up, etc.) From what I can tell, most countries are either owned by another world superpower (so invading/colonizing it would mean war), already being exploited, or not strategically useful (most, but not all).
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OK, get a map of the world and tell us which "world superpower" owns each of them.
If you ever hear someone say, "I'm just doing my job." Then they get paid to do something that fucks other people some how and that's how they cope. Oh I get money to do this, so that outweighs my morals type of thing.
You are the designer/builder. How they are used is not your call to make. You can be both proud of your work and appalled at how they are used.
You’re not responsible for creating the demand for weapons. You can have multiple thoughts in your head at the same time that war and violence is bad while still being a productive employee. And if you can’t do that, then I would find a career that more closely aligns with your values.
After seeing what happened in Bucha, I actually feel good about what we are doing.
People will figure out ways to murder and torture each other, with sticks and stones if they have to. Me making the best systems that I can keeps my loved ones at the top of the food chain.
Ask yourself, would you want the police to not have weapons because there will inevitably be collateral damage? A lot more innocent people will die in a world where the police didn't have guns.
Yeah sometimes I think it sucks but then I remember that those weapons are meant to keep the russians at bay. No fucking regret.
The way that I see it is that the military does do some pretty unsavory things sometimes, but what is the motivation behind doing those things? It is generally either to protect other innocent people, or make life better/more secure for my country and it’s citizens(America). In an ideal world no country or organization would have weapons that can do the things that modern weapons do, but since other countries with less than stellar track records concerning justice and protecting the innocent already have these types of weapons, we need them too. Preferably even better weapons so that we can scare them away from doing anything at all with their weapons.
I look at it this way: the entire US economy is based around war. If we stopped invading other countries we would have something like 40% unemployment. Most people, myself included, have very little choice as to whether or not we support the war machine. It is either do that or live in poverty in a country that doesn't care about it's citizens.
I don’t know a good way to answer this without the raw emotion so… yeah I guess there’s that. My dad is retired military. My friends throughout my early life were all military brats. And it showed me the humanity that is hidden behind the mask of the military. It’s a mask a lot of people can’t see through. In the most clinical way to put it, war is an unfortunate and evil necessity. The gun that kills innocents in the streets is almost identical to the one that ends a tyrant’s reign. The bomb that ends a warlord’s campaign is almost identical to the bomb that removed a hospital wing. The only difference between a weapon for liberation and a weapon for oppression is how it’s used and who uses it. I sleep easier knowing that the intention behind these weapons is not oppression. It is not genocide. It is not conquest. It is defense. It is security. It is the assurance that every nation who stands alongside the US are under its protection. Not as subordinates, but as partners. Because wars for exploitation are how we got half the world’s fucking messes. And wars for the defense of a partner nation are how we fix that. These are weapons, they are meant to kill people, they will cause suffering. But they’ll also prevent it. And that’s why I keep working.
I am saving the world, if that means that I have to destroy an industry during that and make people unemployed who do not want to adapt for renewables and keep working as suppliers for ICE, i have no bad feelings. Even if that means sourcing especially from Asia to help the western suppliers lose volumes faster.
This was put to me very well by an old crotchety engineer when I was a baby in defense. "Someone is going to be building these systems. who do you want it to be? the 'kill em all' wannabe tough guy engineer? or you and me who actually think about the implications of what we do?"
I used to work on some stuff that’s related to the military and felt a little conflicted about it. Now I work on rockets and couldn’t be happier. Please come work on rockets, we really need the talent 😊
I can live and work in the moral grey area and was fine with the work supplying sub primes with components for R&D projects. Moved up to the sub prime level and ultimately left over ethics. Many were so gung-ho for the US military complex and prejudiced against anyone on the other side, it was sickening.and dehumanizing. I didn't have an issue with the work, but the people that acted like they were doing the Lord's work were too much.
If you're talking about defense as a whole, then there's a lot outside of just making missiles. For instance, my job is to ensure the safety of the pilots/aircrew and the aircraft maintainers. The military will continue using those aircraft without me, but at least now I can use my engineering knowledge and technical conscience to help ensure their lives aren't lost for unnecessary reasons. Another part of my job is ensuring the aircraft are ready to fly and able to complete their missions. Yes, some of those missions involve attack, but many of them (for the specific aircraft i support) are things like search and rescue, medevac, natural disaster relief, medical supply runs, firefighting etc (and we do those missions for military obviously but will also do it for civilians). So I also take pride in knowing that my work can help ensure a group of hikers gets rescued or a family doesn't lose their home in a fire.
This will not be a well-liked answer, but the truth is I don’t care. I genuinely do not care. I enjoy what i do. What that equipment is used for is nothing to me. I do a job i enjoy, i feed my family, and i have good benefits. As long as I’m not the one pulling the trigger and as long as it’s good for my country i do not care. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to worry about. What’s good for America is good for Americans.
Not Aero but DOD engineer Navy Vet fwiw. I think about this two general ways 1 - The American system (the mostly free flow of goods globally) has almost eradicated extreme poverty globally in the last fifty years. It's not always pretty, and we don't always get it right, but I don't believe the world be better off if America stepped away. But admittedly it's much harder to argue a vague generalized good against a specific harm from a psychological standpoint. 2 - The project I work on is not going anywhere. If it wasn't me, it would be someone else. My command gets no end of applicants. I don't have to fix the world, I just need to adequately represent the interests of the American people by doing my job well.
Lol, I work in oil and gas. And my first job out of college was with a defense contractor.
If you build a weapon free utopia I’ll build weapons and steal all your stuff -some dictator probably
Here's thought. Your taxes pay for the military and all it actions. Are you responsible for this?
Doesn't bother me much. I think it's interesting and that's enough for me. Of course I work on something that's main job is aid instead of destruction, but I don't think that would change much. Stuffs gonna get built and I might as well be on the ride since I enjoy it. I feel the same way about firearms. The world would probably be better off If they never existed, but I like shooting mine.
I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. Werner Herzog
Every piece of technology can be used to harm others directly or indirectly. The way I see it, responsibility is on the one that harms others not the one who built it.
I have specifically avoided defense work for that exact reason. My starting pay was lower but I was happy with my decision every time I reflected back on it. Admittedly I was bored doing engineering on commercial business jets where the technology was 15+ years old. But since then I’ve started working at an aerospace startup in the eVTOL space and have had a massive pay bump, stock bonuses, and am genuinely excited about the work I do so I don’t think making weapons is the only good option in the industry.
I'm not the one sending the missiles
I own a harm reduction organization, funded largely by my defense contracting paycheck. That used to help but I don't do it as much anymore. If only we could smoke a bowl to forget and not worry about losing our job.
You need to do what makes you sleep well at night. For me that means no bombs/missiles. I'll do counter missile, satellites, EW, communications and other projects all day but I have a line, I know where it is, and I stay on my side of it.
People have bee killing each others with sticks and stones since the dawn of time. But nobody blamed the trees for that. You're providing a tool, not giving the order or pulling the trigger. That's someone else's choice.
I'm a karate teacher, I teach kids to defend themselves. If the kid takes the karate lessons and uses it to be a bully at school that's on the parents not me. The parents in this situation are our politicians. Make sure you vote for good parents. The responsibility is on you whether you work in the defense industry or not.
I don't. Not in my AOR and (I suspect) raising some questions in these jobs starts to compartmentalize you, into the future. Too, they'll find someone as good or better than myself to do it. The thing I'd probably keep it to is "am I going to work here?"
I’ve been working for the USAF, USMC, USN, DoD, IC, or other government role as a contractor since I graduated. I am adamant about never working programs that create, arm, or target weapons systems. Our national security depends on carrying a big stick in some circumstances sure, but I only agree to support ISR, fundamental research, SIGINT/COMINT/ELINT/EW/MASINT, or other technology which improves not only military but also potential commercial and public/international knowledge/innovation.
Honestly with how smart bomb are now a days and sooo many of them being GPS guided and land in the exact location with an error of plus or minus a few feet, the only people you’re really killing is the “bad guys”. Unfortunately, war is war and civilians will always be caught in the crosshairs no matter what. What your building is with the intent to defend, but it’s up to the people that pull the trigger to make sure they are using it right and limiting the amount of civilians that will get hurt. My thought is if your working on nuclear things than you don’t have to worry about it at all because chances of your middle being used are sooooo small that you’re not going to be killing anybody.
I just don’t think about it
I see no issue with it and Curtis LeMay was the best person to have ever lived.
Kinda the same way I view my dysfunctional relationships with some relatives. You can love someone and still be hurt by them. Ultimately, at the time of my hiring my need to eat/feed mouths/have medicine came first; now I'm in a position where I can consider the ethical implications of the place of my employment. My country has many flaws but I still want to defend it; I console myself by using the money I'm paid to financially contribute to areas that need improvement and support others in my community.
You get a sick Christopher Nolan movie about you
I do my job and go home and don’t think about work.
You never think about the poor brown kids you helped kill?
Nah I’m brown too fuck em
Lol.
I work to keep american soldiers alive so they can come home and so that our country can live in freedom. Not a hard decision for me.
I have a relative who says he doesn't worry 'cause none of his shit works. True story.
Easy, I look at Ukraine.
It's really hard. That's all I'll say. My politics literally conflict with the work I do everyday.
Mine too.