[perardi]

You are vastly overestimating how much the average US citizen thinks about the military at all, except in the vaguest ways related to social signaling about their class.

We basically have a caste system for the military, so outside certain geographic regions and economic classes, military stuff happens [gestures vaguely] over there. People will posture about it, but nah, nobody will actually cut spending, as the military-industrial complex is everywhere, and “cutting military spending” actually becomes “we can’t shut down that base or stop making that engine part, because jobs”.

What will actually happen is superficial cuts to programs that don’t contribute meaningfully to the debt, but are nice culture war targets. Past that, we’ll engage in some gross race and class cuts to Medicaid. But we are not going to cut military spending, because, again, it’s a jobs program that’s protected by a vague sense of patriotic duty.