It also doesn't make sense that we're supposedly countering Russian and Chinese "super weapons" by continuing to waste billions on antiquated military technology that hasn't been used since WWII (tanks, submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter planes, etc.). By far the biggest Russian and Chinese threat we face is with cyber security, if we want to spend money on defense, it should be to bolster our cyber infrastructure. Otherwise, if Russia and China want to go bankrupt building "super weapons" that don't really matter in the nuclear age, we shouldn't try to beat them in a race to the bottom. This is even before considering how much other useful the troops we have stationed all over the world could be doing (fixing roads and bridges, improving our energy grid (which is laughably ty compared to countries like Germany)) or how much money we spend on the additional healthcare needs of veterans after we send them to fight stupid wars.
A lot of stuff like bloated military spending has essentially become a job program masquerading as something else in order to put a band-aide on the giant gap that exists between the supply of low or no skill labor in this country vs. the demand for it, and that's a part of why it sticks around imo. Lockheed Martin alone has 100,000 employees and the overwhelming majority of them would be out of a job overnight if our military spending was at the level of EU countries. I'd also put the War on Drugs in that bucket too. We'd have god knows how many prison guards, drug enforcement police, prosecutors, etc. who would all be on their ass without the drug policy we've had since Nixon. The amount of jobs that get created by government programs Conservatives want even though the free market has no demand for those jobs is about as socialist as it gets.
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