There's something more to it, though.

America has such a massive commercial and industrial apparatus (regardless of what anybody trying to puff up the Chinese or Russians might say) that we have effectively made it entirely possible to maintain a relatively high state of war without the general economy really ever feeling it.

In concert with this, the clever manipulation of the populace by both mainstream media, government agencies, and also by internet news outlets has allowed the populace to at once constantly fear for their safety while never actually building to the point of questioning why, exactly, the same officials and policies are held day in and day out. This isn't the matter of conspiracies, mind you, it's simply business.

The utterly terrifying thing is that, in the meanwhile, all of us nice techies have been training people to accept ubiquitous surveillance and even outright writing the tools ourselves.

And so, the credible foreign enemies gone, we see all this apparatus beginning to turn inwards.

Can us nice techies put our minds towards a non-violent economic migration plan for the entire military-industrial complex :) Other industries are regularly lectured on the merits of adapting to a changing economy.

The best way to think of the military industrial complex is a giant social and corporate welfare program. Just like there are prison towns, where the entire non-imprisoned population depends on the prisoners for jobs, there are entire swaths of our country dependent on military bases, contractors, etc.

There is also a disturbing ratchet effect. It is almost always easier to argue for more (weapons/surveillance/police/prisons) in the name of safety. Far more difficult to argue against them. So we only seem to be moving in one direction.

The seemingly-now-inevitable decriminalization of marijuana and lessening on the Drug War in the US notwithstanding (which is a welcome development, but I'm not sure it is because of a general discontent with the militarized state of daily life)

When it comes to military conflict we're certainly only moving in one direction: smaller.

if you were the president, how would you solve this problem? and solve it without upsetting the large number of people who currently rely on the military/war machine to sustain themselves? It's probably true that those people offer next to nothing of real value - but the current system is set up such that they are at least living a middle class lifestyle (think military subcontractors), and would do much to try and perserve their way of life.

It's a hard problem because the productive economy doesn't require so many people, and yet, overt welfare is shunned.

One starting point would be a public dialogue about the topic.