Its framing in the context of threats to the US. The CIA can do their job and attempt to catch foreign hackers, you don't need 800 billion of army, navy, and marines sitting around to do that.
>the CIA is not responsible for "catching foreign hackers". That is the FBI.
>the US military is roughly 1.5 million people. that is in total. .00375% of the US population
I know it is easy to think that america has a huge military, and that the CIA is some massive organization that functions as an all knowing entity, and that they do nothing. But you need to expand your information sources. Watching the news and 0dark30 does not adequately prepare one to understand how international relations work.
To make a parallel, if there is some tech company that has a small, highly skilled staff, would it be silly for them to spend ~22% of their gross total budget on having the best gear and training?
> the CIA is not responsible for "catching foreign hackers". That is the FBI.
The CIA is foreign, the FBI is domestic. They are both investigative agencies. If the hackers are operating out of the US for a foreign interest, they are in the domain of the FBI. If they are attacking from China, thats the CIA's business.
> I know it is easy to think that america has a huge military, and that the CIA is some massive organization that functions as an all knowing entity, and that they do nothing.
It isn't "think". The US spends 4 times as much as the next largest military, China, while having the same land area and a quarter the population. We have treaties and agreements that make us the military defense force of a quarter of the world, and we do about a third of the spending. While being 4% of the global population.
And of course the CIA is doing stuff. That is my point. You don't need the 800 billion dollar tumor to have a foreign investigations agency do their job protecting us from information threats.
> To make a parallel, if there is some tech company that has a small, highly skilled staff, would it be silly for them to spend ~22% of their gross total budget on having the best gear and training?
The staff you describe are only trained to stand in front of your competitors offices and block them from entering. They aren't adding value to the company, they are just eating its resources to threaten the competition. The 800 billion sunk into the DoD is producing a trickle of R&D results and innovation, but is not improving our GDP or producing goods or services of value to citizens.
The bigger question is why when you have a small, highly skilled staff (NASA) you regularly cut its budget when it has at various points in history produced incredible R&D returns for its cost.