RuBee
38 points by rslabbert
38 points by rslabbert
This was actually a fascinating read about something I would otherwise never have heard of
I’ve been thinking lately about how profitable it is to sell to the military and intelligence agencies.
I wonder, like, how much of the economy is actually decoupled from that? Even a tech company like Google partly profits from the military. Does a disproportionate amount of profit come that way? Like, it seems difficult to avoid working on tech for the military in a for-profit company. The incentive is too high.
In terms of full decoupling, given that military also operates bases, I would expect that everything large has at least some of their products sold to military for one purpose or another, via wholesale resellers if not directly.
Being to get the special military profitability (e.g. USA cost-plus development contracts) takes a separate kind of competence that even SpaceX claims to lack. Although they are happy to do custom orders for military (e.g. Starshield).
Estimating custom military orders, or maybe also majority-military products would probably the proper answer to your question, but it would also be classified.