Most people believe that we have three branches of government, the judicial, legislative, and executive, with the President of our country, being the Commander-in-Chief. While this sounds nice on paper, in practicality and in actuality, none of this is actually true. They say, follow the money, and if you follow the money, there is only one conclusion that a reasonable man can possibly come up with, and that is this country is firmly and has been firmly in the hands of the military-industrial complex.
We know that this is true by looking at the federal budget for discretionary spending for the United States of America. In fiscal year 2015, out of discretionary budget expenditures of $1.11 trillion dollars as reported by nationalpriorities.org, America budgeted $598.5 billion dollars for military spending as well as $65.3 billion on Veterans' benefits, for a total of $663.8 billion dollars which represents 59.8% of the entire discretionary spending of the United States. While, America does spend even more money per capita on healthcare and social security, these expenditures are considered to be part of the social fabric of the government's obligation to its citizens, and thereby are properly classified as mandatory governmental spending.
When it comes to defense spending the very first thing to recognize, is that this world, has been completely discovered, as there are no more, and have not been for a long time, any uncharted or undiscovered countries. This means, that it is a fact, that these are the known knowns, and there are therefore no unknowns on this planet. Since World War II, the one country that has been brought up again and again as a possible rival to America's current world domination, is Russia, yet Russia has not attacked America and realistically has absolutely no intentions of every attacking America, and it probably never really has. The fact of the matter is wars are typically fought for two things, plunder, that is resources and continental development, and to a lesser extent for cheap exploitable labor. In an era in which physical labor has become of less and less worth, because of technology, robotics, and the like, this leaves as the most fundamental reason for war as plunder. The thing about plunder is that with trade barriers having been eradicated or eased in virtually every country, and the fact that multi-national corporations, really are truly massive, intercontinental, and practically ubiquitous in any country of real substance, is that plunder no longer needs to be at the point of a sword, as it is already being conducted by trade agreements between countries or the elites of those certain countries on behalf of well-placed multinational corporations and their cronies.
This means, in effect, that a significant chunk, probably exceeding well over 50% of our current defense spending is for things, personnel, weapons, and so forth, to which there is absolutely nothing that is being accomplished of any positive worth, other than those in that business that are profiting from it. It would appear that nearly every bomb that we build, every tank, every war plane, or air carrier, is literally food, shelter, and education being taken from the oppressed and poor of our own country, so that the military-industrial complex can continually feed off of and exploit the citizens of America, as well as constantly to saber rattle, invade, disrupt, corrupt, and terrorize sovereign nations and peoples all over the world, who are almost always no material threat to America, whatsoever.