The government landed men on the moon fifty years ago and SpaceX is still blowing up rockets regularly, I'm not sure your comparison is particularly flattering to SpaceX.
Moreover, I fee like our government today would have a hard time pulling off that feat. In the early 60s we still had somewhat nimble areas of government. I don't think it's true today. We allow too many interests to have too much pull and negative influence causing some kind of paralysis as well and franken-projects that are impossibly encompassing.
And cannot accomplish that task again today. And did it by investing massive quantities of money and resources in a project, which no business could possibly hope to match, unless they print their own cash flow, as the government does.
It never worked out particularly well for the Army, either. Every war in US history before the establishment of a permanent standing army with NATO is a story of a hasty, disorganized clusterfuck for upwards of a year until a semi-professional organization was painfully established, and it's rarely until year two or three that a really effective force could ever be forged out of the tiny cadre of professionals and the mass influx of untrained volunteers or conscripts.
Which is funny, because as the original comment points out that until after we'd been attacked during WWII, we didn't have a significant standing army. After we were attacked, we started a large buildup, and ended up on the winning side. Every war the US engaged in since then, we've both already had a standing army, and we've LOST. So statistically at least, having a large standing army is more likely to lose us a war.
To be fair, in all of those wars we've lost, there has been strategic ineptitude from the top down in each one. Vietnam was a bad idea, which is why the people of the US protested it so hard. Anything in the middle east has been a clusterf, and even the people choosing to go there knew it was stupid. I'll allow that Korea was somewhat sensible in terms of long-term defense, but even then it could've been handled better. But a standing army hasn't been winning us wars, that's for sure.
Stealth is overrated. It's been over-rated since the Serbs shot down an F117 twenty years ago.
AI can be good. But a man is better AI than AI itself. And generally it's a whole lot lighter in weight.
The F-35 is too heavy, and has too little range to be useful.
WW2 planes were simple and spartan. They were light in weight and more manoeuvrable because they were simple and spartan.
America relies too much on advanced weaponry. (Vietnam, Afghanistan... cough, cough) The Germans in WW2 had the most advanced weaponry. But the Allies and Soviets swamped those advanced weapons with sheer numbers of 'good enough' weapons.
It's no good having a weapon with a 100:1 kill-ratio if the enemy can throw 101 of his weapons at it.
Imagine where SpaceX would be if the government got in there making sure everyone was happy and all 50 states got a piece of the action.