The US military-industrial complex operates as a wealth transfer scheme, designed to funnel taxpayer money away from public needs and back into oligarchs’ pockets. This creates perverse incentives to develop overly complex, expensive weapons systems produced in small batches with lucrative maintenance contracts. The result is fragile equipment that’s costly to maintain which is precisely what you don’t want in actual warfare. Given that systemic pressures remain the same, I expect that the dynamic isn’t going to change either.

The irony is that this mirrors Nazi Germany’s WW2 mistakes. Their pride in advanced, precision weapons worked against smaller nations, but failed catastrophically against the Soviet Union’s strategy of mass-producing ‘good enough’ weapons at overwhelming scale. When quality met quantity in a war of attrition, quantity won decisively.

Military expenditures should of never been counted as a net positive to gdp just as the guy who invented gdp intended.