I'm not sure if you're saying this is a good thing or bad thing. I've worked closely with police and military and the front line folks of these and similar "operational" departments should be the least of people's concerns with respect to government spending imo. Like much of the rest of government and the broader public sector, its the growth of the administrative layers that's where the real waste is occurring. Money that could provide more front line services that could be valuable is instead going in to administrating them.

I just checked because I'm more familiar with Canada, eg [0] where senior military officers have grown in number while number of members have fallen, and I see that the US actually has caps on number of generals that have prevented the same growth.

[0] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadi...

> I'm not sure if you're saying this is a good thing or bad thing.

Mission accomplished. I try to be neutral.

Nope

The figure includes nearly 2.1 million federal employees, 4.1 million contract employees, 1.2 million grant employees, 1.3 million active duty military personnel, and more than 500,000 postal service employees.

Active duty doesn’t include all DoD employees, bruv. It’s by far the biggest department.

how many active duty military personnel would it take to just protect america instead of project america?