Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.
Which is a direct function of its budget not a function of what it does.
> (almost certainly at a lower per capita cost).
DoD is extremely expensive per job due to the longe term benefits, layers of bureaucracy, and sub contractors.
This is not necessarily true for large segments of the DOD.
NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility.
OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them.
> In the early 1980s, when the GLC (Greater London Council) was trying to save and create jobs to mitigate the impact of Thatcher's recession, we discovered that the most labour-intensive form of public spending was the arts, and so during the five years from 1981 to 1986 we increased spending on arts and recreation from £l6 million to £160 million. Virtually every actor, painter, poet, sculptor and, in particular, community artist was in work, and it made London a much more exciting city to live in. As well as taking orchestras from the Royal Festival Hall to play in the canteen at Ford's Assembly Plant in Dagenham, we particularly tried to reach disaffected youth. It's against that background that I was able to understand Chris Johnston's book. (Oh, and by the way, if you want to know which is the least labour-intensive form of public spending, it is the military.)
Maybe if we stopped pushing insane amounts of money into fossil fuels and the military industrial complex, and instead redirected it into the arts and sciences then, just maybe, we might actually end up with a happier, more employed, more fulfilled, and more equal planet.
Why not just do it all? Fund the military and the arts and the sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/06/26/nx-s1-5871963/un-agency-pause...
Going all out on Iran would free up the straight, but also be political suicide for the right.
It showed limits for sure. But the limits were bluster without the will to follow through (and accept the consequences).
It’s a political and diplomatic catastrophe for an empire in decline. But if control of the strait had been an actual priority, it would have been very achievable. That was never the goal though. The goal was to look stupid on TV, for some reason.
Pretty much. I think US military was given the order to make Trump look good, and they couldn’t (Trump looks weak now, which he completely hates)
I agree they can’t make him look good. And I guess we’re agreeing the mission was not actually to control the strait in as a critical military objective .