While all of this is true, to an extent, the US military, specifically, is wildly inefficient in ways that almost no other military comes close to, perhaps with the exception of Russia.

Even putting aside any questions of corruption, pork, etc, just look at the basic structure and ask yourself “Does this make any fucking sense at all?”

You have:

• The Army, which handles ground combat.
• The Air Force, which handles air combat.
• The Space Force which does nothing.
• The Navy, which handles nautical combat… and also has an air force to handle air combat… The thing the Air Force does???
• The Marine Corps, which handles ground combat… Wait, don’t we have an army for that? Oh, also they have an air force, to handle air combat… The thing that the Navy does… Wait what?

Seriously, just at an overall structural level, what the actual fuck is going on here? Why does the United States have two armies and three air forces?

At least they all use the same equipment right?

FUCKING NOPE.

Different small arms, different vehicles, different aircraft, different fucking supply chains.

The F-47? Yeah, that’s for the Air Force. The Navy has their own entirely separate 6th gen program in the works. Because the Navy has a fucking air force and it’s not the same air force as the fucking Air Force.

I saw a video the other day where an American military blogger got to tour a Canadian ship, and he was absolutely bewildered by the fact that the guys who flew the helicopter were RCAF, not RCN. “I guess they’re, like, on loan or something”. No, they’re not, they’re just deployed to the ship because Canada has an integrated military.

The US doesn’t. That’s absolutely wild. Every branch of the military in the US is basically a separate organization with it’s own distinct top brass, all of whom pull high 6 figure salaries to basically replicate the same work over and over.

There’s a lot of discussion that goes into how high the US military budget is (over a trillion dollars now, and they’re asking for 1.5), but not nearly enough discussion of how little bang for their buck the US actually gets for that insanely bloated budget, because their military is so ridiculously inefficient. The average NATO military is, yes, kind of underfunded, and we’re only just now rectifying that, but at the same time decades of being underfunded has forced the average NATO military to get comparatively good at maximizing the impact of those dollars. There are still tonnes of inefficiencies (just speaking for Canada our procurement is a fucking mess, and our top brass are seriously overstuffed with guys who ride empty desks), but the effectiveness of something like the CAF per dollar spent is so much higher than the US military. There’s a reason NATO partners regularly stomp the yanks in exercises.

Every single military has bloat and inefficiency, but the scale of it in the US is orders of magnitude beyond almost anywhere else. They could probably halve their military budget and still retain every bit of their current effectiveness just by consolidating, reorganizing and integrating. And they’d still be able to keep throwing piles of money at Microsoft to make gamer glasses that no one wants.

So… basically a top-heavy jobs program?

When I was canvassing for a leftist candidate, I talked to a lot of people involved in the defense industry and they were all pretty much single issue voters–“keep giving me money.” I imagine they’re in every state.