“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
The narrative needs to be switched around to highlight defense spending as "entitlements" to defense contractors and numerous local economies that depend on them.
You can't make an absolute statement that every gun comes at the expense of the poor, because if we hadn't had guns, I can assure you we all (including the poor) would have been worse off under a Nazi or Russian Communist regime.
You can't tell me that if the entire US fleet was sunk, every tank blown up, that the US couldn't rebuild in a year or two if the public was all-in on support.
Instead the US has this enormous force that, by virtue of merely existing, it feels compelled to use now and then.
It doesn't seem wise to rely on that always being true. The U.S. has not been involved in wars for very long (considering the history of war) and war has changed so much recently that assuming things won't change in the future seems like a bad plan.
The closest to a symmetrical war was in Korea, after China sent troops. And that war has never really been resolved.
Never mind never having had to operate the industry under 24/7 bombardment.
The US military, which is ridiculous, couldn't even keep a lid on Iraq and it's not even as big as Texas. There's no adversary that could possibly mount a bombing campaign that big, not even the US itself.
The Soviet Union's ideology originally included the long term goal of promulgating the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide. However, even Lenin's ideology changed a lot when faced with the actual challenges of ruling a country.