Military funding is used as a slight of hand. The legislature scares the public, the public hands over money, and then the military is used to invest the money in long term goals to build a future technological society that the private sector is wholly unwilling to do because of short term profit focus.

This also has the benefit of getting war averse liberals to say nice things about the large standing army and bloody foreign interventions of the US empire, most of which have failed to produce anything other than blowback and civil war across the globe.

https://archive.org/details/NoamChomsky-ScienceMilitaryFundi...