| > Military industrial complex gets bored quickly. Eisenhower coined that term. During the Korean War, defence spending was 12% of GDP; in the 1970s during the Cold War, it was 8%. It is currently about 3.5% of GDP: * https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1o919po/why_i... It's not a small amount, being the largest discretionary line programs in the federal budget, but it's no where near what it once was. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget And it should be noted that keeping that industry (and manufacturing in general) alive is important: > Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car. > Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now |
Here [1] is a graph of US military spending, inflation adjusted. It's going up, up, and away.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...