New airport designers are badly needed, seems to me 12-year olds may be better suited to the task than the construction companies contracted currently!
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
The winning airport design will probably be an ex-airport, returned to nature as a forest, or repurposed as a solar/wind farm.
The tragedy of the commons is real, regardless of how irrational or selfish it may seem.
I sort of suspect the answer here, as with all things, isn’t command but alternatives. Hydrogen and EV aircraft are nascent. Nuclear air craft exist, and can be built with modern miniature reactors that are entirely safe.
The problem is funding goes more towards killing varied brown people than improving technology.
The "war on terror" is mostly wound down now. But the point you're making is not correct; most advanced technology, especially aerospace, emerged from military research grants.
I agree a lot of advancements came from the military but what an absurdly inefficient way to achieve that. Most of the military expenditure is on personnel and infrastructure. Military R&D is a pittance, not directly released to civil use, and inefficiently allocated. Even DOE investment is primarily towards war making and nuclear arsenal upgrade, research, and maintenance. The primary DOE fusion research is done as a slight of budget for nuclear war making rather than energy generation. The spin off tech from defense spending is a drop in the bucket of what could have been achieved had that funding been open civil research towards strategic goals like sustainable energy independence.
All this said I’ll grant that the relative global stability imposed by the US on the world has ushered in a period of discovery unrivaled by simply providing a world where global societies weren’t being repaved every 10 year, with the repaving being contained to proxy war zones. This is not without immense value - and almost certainly staved of many very bad scenarios. The trick will be maintaining that stability over the next 50 years. It’s not obvious to me we can sustain that. But what we have had was bought with that defense spending.