US military expenditure is a stealth job creation program. It's politically untenable for any American government to announce a $1.5 trillion dollar scheme to create 100,000 skilled manufacturing jobs in the rust belt, unless that scheme produces a fighter aircraft. It's a woefully inefficient job creation scheme, but that inefficiency means that a lot of different stakeholders can get a slice of the pie.

Everyone would be better off if that money was spent on clean energy or healthcare, but the American electorate are far more willing to sign a blank check for defence.

    1 500 000 000 000
    ----------------- = 15 000 000
              100 000

That would, in theory, result in 8-figure jobs for every serviceman. Is that right? Where is the excess going?

I was obliquely referring to the F-35 program, which is forecast to cost ~$1.5tn and is estimated to have created ~100,000 jobs within the services and via contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. The F-35 is a dreadful aircraft that is grounded indefinitely because it keeps trying to suffocate pilots, but it has kept a lot of factories busy and made a lot of senators happy. Lockheed Martin proudly trumpet the fact that there are suppliers for the F-35 project in 46 states - that's a lot of pork to go around.

The US defence budget is lousy with pork-barrel projects. The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless. The services might be facing deep sequestration cuts, but there's been no let-up in the procurement of expensive and unnecessary hardware.

http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-approves-useless-mil... http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...

> The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless.

Wow. One has to wonder when some of those tanks will eventually reach regular law enforcement, like lots of other military hardware tends to.

The military budget is $600B. There are 1.2M active and 0.8M reserve servicemen.

Like any old organization, they have legacy costs: healthcare and pensions for former and retired servicemen are phenomenal.

I thought healthcare and pensions weren't included in that $600B, but farmed out to other parts of the budget?

Nope. Pensions (technically, retired pay and retainer pay) come out of the MILPERS budget. Military retirees are still military personnel, and generally exist within one of three statuses within the reserve component of the last armed service in which they served. For Navy personnel, for example, they are on the Retired List, the Retired Reserve, or the Fleet Reserve.

Unfortunately the way that it gets handed to the service components, they can only spend the money on what it's budgeted for. This leads to situations where training budgets are very tight but you have a huge office supply budget. So units buy $1000 chairs but can't afford to send their troops to training

Gotta pay those defense contractors somehow. We can't skip out on those payments!