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I think of the USS Nimitz. Everything on that ship is (presumably) there for an excellent military reason. Yet it has probably never been attacked directly and it clearly has an important role in maintaining status and prestige. The two things are correlated, not independent.

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A nice inverse example is Versailles, which has quite limited protection and couldn’t really be defended from military attack.

Yet it was an effective military tool: visiting potentates would see an overwhelmingly expensive palace that sent the message “we are so rich and so powerful that we don’t even need to defend our central palace, so don’t even try to attack us”

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