Each year, the federal government puts forth a budget, of which an outrageous sum of monies is dedicated to the "defense" of this great nation. While there is something to be said about being prepared militarily for adverse events and therefore the protection of this nation, it must be unequivocally stated that the United States is absolutely in no imminent danger of being attacked by any other nation, or consortium of nations, or even terrorists in which it or its people are truly endangered to any meaningful extent. In fact, it would appear that a whole lot of money dedicated to defense spending, is actually directed to areas of the world which are not United States territory, of which the necessity of the United States having to be the world's policeman is not written into any document, whatsoever. Further to the point, by definition, wars and the planning of wars, are destructive in nature, not just of infrastructure but of people, and should be avoided to the degree that they can be avoided, as an impractical and immoral way to resolve differences and disputes.
How this country spends its money most definitely matters, in which brown.edu reports via the Cost of Wars Project that it "…finds that federal spending on domestic programs creates far more American jobs and yields more broad-based benefits than military spending." In particular, this study states that "$1 million spent on defense creates 6.9 direct and indirect jobs, the same amount spent on elementary and secondary education creates 19.2 jobs." Additionally, out of the ten categories studied by the Cost of Wars Project, monies spent on defense spending, finished dead last in its ability to create direct and indirect jobs. That really shouldn't be all that surprising since the defense industry is far too often, non-transparent, non-competitive, and crippled with notorious cost overruns, in which, a lot of what is being manufactured serves no useful purpose other than to kill, harm, or to destroy people and infrastructures.
The military-industrial-technological complex wants to get as many contracts as it can from the government in order to increase its power and its corresponding profits, but the spending of all these billions upon armaments and equipment of all sorts isn't often productive, because what people really need is not more sophisticated killing and destroying machines, but rather good healthcare, good education, safe neighborhoods, and good economic opportunity. The United States is the world's richest nation in aggregate, but that money has skewed more and more to those few people and corporations working in select industries, so that those that are impoverished and living in substandard conditions have not been alleviated from their trying conditions.
It must be remembered that every dollar spent to kill another human being in some foreign nation or to bomb such into oblivion, is a dollar taken from the very mouths of those domestic citizens that are trying to uplift themselves into something of merit, but find that their efforts to do so are often futile, because they live in ghettos of poverty, of which their ill education, their poor healthcare, their limited job opportunities, and the police state that they must daily contend with, precludes them from having a fair shot at any semblance of success.
The military budget of the United States absolutely dwarfs any other nation; whereas the systemic poverty in this the greatest and richest nation of the world, should be a source of real embarrassment to it, but apparently is not. It would appear that America has turned out the light of liberty and opportunity for so many of its domestic denizens, in order to, instead, destroy with armaments that which they cannot convince or win over by providing a noble exemplar worth emulating.