yogthos ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Of course, spending doesn’t actually directly translate into being able to make decent weapons. Since US relies on a privately owned military industrial complex it runs into the problem of perverse incentives. Companies want to siphon as much public money as they can from the government, and that means making expensive weapons that take a long time to produce and have high maintenance costs. This ensures you have low input costs because you’re not producing much, and that you’re able to keep sucking money out of the system for the few items you do produce. To put this into perspective, it costs ten times as much to produce an artillery shell in US than in Russia, and US is still unable to ramp up its production after a year and a half of war to match Russia.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is famous for its corruption having failed audits for 6 years in a row and is unable to account for $3.8 trillion in military assets.

All of this results in an incredibly expensive and inefficient system that isn’t actually able to produce basic things like artillery shells in large quantities. US military industrial complex is good at doing what it was designed to do, which is to divert taxes from things they’re meant for such as social services and infrastructure into the pockets of the oligarchs who own the war industry.

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