Sources:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/03/the-f-47-fighter-cost-problem-no-one-wants-to-touch/
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-shahed-drones-gulf-patriot-air-defence-cost-crisis/ (assuming 2 missiles to each drone and the lowest estimate of drone costs)
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Open to discussion because I frankly don't know what I'm talking about, but I have a growing suspicion, given the US's recent performance, that the true purpose of the military budget is congressional pork.
Eisenhower described the problem in 1961. so for at least 65 years a significant factor of foreign policy has been rich executives of arms manufacturers and military contractors who profit from war making "donations" to politicians who decide when to go to war, and who and how much to award military contracts to. it's called the military-industrial complex
It always has been. They understood the assignment very well. Funnel money from the public to defense contractors.
It's true what you said about the interceptor which is why Ukraine uses interceptor drones against shahed types. Patriot was only used against ballistic missiles before they ran out.
Everything the US government (or really any government) does is dual purpose. Pork + Function.
NASA launches are obscenely expensive (even as space programs go) because everything NASA does needs to create a job in the seats of 50 odd different senators.
Military procurement is super expensive, partially because modern military hardware is just an engineering marvel, but also because it needs to make the right jobs, hire the right contractors, meet ballooning requirements etc... Doesn't mean they aren't trying to get value for money, but if that's all you focused on you'd buy all your military hardware from Temu.
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:
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.
People love money, what can I say?
Yeah, but if you proposed a jobs program to those people, they would be outraged. Because it's military, it's "good", moral. I think that's why the anti-war left is such a threat to the establishment, because the political system is built on military grift. If the military loses its sheen of holiness, the system collapses.
because a jobs program is for the poor, you know the people who actually need jobs, they dont want that. they want more money so they can buy their fourth rental property.
Some of it is just good old industry subsidies from an unrelated (and overblown) budget.