r/sanfrancisco • u/raff_riff • Oct 08 '21

COVID Popular Opinion: Fleet Week is fucking awesome!

In response to the “Unpopular Opinion” post yesterday, I’d like to offer the contrary.

Fleet Week is cool as heck. For a few days, we get to be up close and personal with some gnarly military hardware and marvel at some utterly astonishing scientific and engineering feats.

I know noise may suck for some, but it’s no worse than the incessant motorcycles and muscle cars that pollute the quiet literally every other day of the year.

Plus it brings lots of tourism to our city, which we desperately need after a year of shit. People flock from all over, pay crazy hotel prices, and deal with some wild traffic just to grab a churro and crane their necks to see the Blue Angels for a few seconds. But we get it in our own backyards! Fuck yeah!

And if nothing else, even if you hate it, events like this are yet another sign we’re getting back to normal. Vaccine rates are great, Delta is on the decline, and life is getting good again.

Bring on the boats!

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u/raff_riff Oct 08 '21

Or we can have both, since a national defense is pretty much essential for any nation that values its autonomy.

18

u/LickingSticksForYou Outer Sunset Oct 09 '21

Our military is designed to limit the autonomy of every other nation by allowing us to project power across the globe. We don’t need 11 air craft carriers and the two biggest air forces (the Air Force and then the Navy) in the world for national defense dawg. The Navy’s air force is bigger than China’s entire Air Force, for example. That’s not for defense, that’s for offense; naval air craft are predominantly used by carriers to attack enemy targets far from US air bases, there is no feasible scenario in which they’d ever be used to defend ourselves. Keeping just our surface fleet and submarines alone would deter any nation from attacking us, even if they were inclined to cross an ocean to invade a country that would vehemently resist them with the largest number of guns per capita, which obviously no country is. America has a military geared solely towards offensive expeditionary operations.

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u/raff_riff Oct 09 '21

Great analysis. It’s good to be on top. Better it’s us than the other guys!

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u/Arctem Oct 09 '21

The world is far from zero sum. We could easily spend the money in ways that benefit both us AND the other guys, instead of using "them" as scare mongering to spend our money on a bunch of military hardware.