[api]

Yes and no.

Like many other things, there's probably a power law distribution in terms of the cost of reaching certain levels of military capability.

It might cost 10% as much as our budget to get to 75% of the capability, and 80% of our budget to get to 90% of the capability.

The military question is: is that high-end stuff war decisive or not? Or can you win a war with a better strategy or just more of the cheap stuff?

Bringing up terrorism is a red herring. Terrorism gets lots of attention but it doesn't win true wars. You'd need hundreds of 9/11 events to even dent the US's war capability. A war with a nation state is very different from "asymmetric warfare" against a diffuse enemy motivated by an ideology or a set of resentments rather than a true chain of command.