Useless with respect to the purported goal, but they both certainly serve a real purpose, providing a pretext to target undesirables.
And expensive
And with lots of innocent casualties
And corrupt
And supported by morons
And boosting economies outside of the US?
Don't worry about economies in EU, we've done a really good job in hamstringing with "social" policies. Compared with other countries law enforcement in US is pretty decent.