Yes, I agree with this.
"Waste" is the misallocation of resources whereby you don't get as much benefit from choosing A and you would from choosing B. I would certainly rather see money and resources spent on civil engineering projects, like HS2, broadband rollout, CERN, new Motorways than old military technology.
However, tying to sell this to the public is where it gets hard, selling a sporting event seems a lot easier than selling a Nuclear power plant.
>but do you really want to live in a country where everyone is directly or indirectly hired by the military?
This hardly describes the UK, we have an average defence budget that is being cut more and more almost on a daily basis. It's tiny compared to the US.
>considering most of the "spying infrastructure" (and military as well, these days) is still bought from abroad
I'm assuming from your comment you're from the UK, in which case we are that 'abroad'. Defence and cyber engineering is one of our few exports, for better or worse.
And yes, our defence budget is small compared to the US, but looking at how this budget is used in the States, I'd say keeping it small is a good choice: the less bombs we have, the less likely we are of dropping them on random countries (yes we went to Iraq and Afghanistan, but we also pulled out much earlier exactly because of budgetary constraints).
This is the problem with weapons, real or cyber: once you make them, you'll want to use them one way or another.
Regarding actual infrastructure work: if the target was regeneration, surely it would have been cheaper to build it anyway and just give it away for free, which wouldn't have required a massive (and massively expensive) security effort, all the G4S-style jobs-for-cronies and so on?
Personally, I'd rather see the State undertake real infrastructure work on clear and honest terms, rather than having to wait for some international sport mafia rolling into town so that money can be spent.