That’s the major irony to the USA’s world historically high military spending. It’s sort of like a reverse Jevons paradox: there has been so much money pouring into the MIC, and at such an increasing rate, that the entire industry re-oriented towards optimizing graft. So now every new contract is optimized for Maximum cost and Minimum deliverables. And you do really want to minimize the deliverables - after all, every dollar you’re spending on an actual piece of military equipment is a dollar not going into someone’s pocket. And that’s lead to the rapid de-industrialization of the MIC, focused on delivering small quantities of uber complex uber technological wunderwaffe (or more blatantly, just super expensive konventionelle Waffen). When an actual war breaks out, you have counter-intuitive situations like Russia out-producing all of NATO because they prioritized and planned for how to ramp up industrial output.
That’s the major irony to the USA’s world historically high military spending. It’s sort of like a reverse Jevons paradox: there has been so much money pouring into the MIC, and at such an increasing rate, that the entire industry re-oriented towards optimizing graft. So now every new contract is optimized for Maximum cost and Minimum deliverables. And you do really want to minimize the deliverables - after all, every dollar you’re spending on an actual piece of military equipment is a dollar not going into someone’s pocket. And that’s lead to the rapid de-industrialization of the MIC, focused on delivering small quantities of uber complex uber technological wunderwaffe (or more blatantly, just super expensive konventionelle Waffen). When an actual war breaks out, you have counter-intuitive situations like Russia out-producing all of NATO because they prioritized and planned for how to ramp up industrial output.