What the US really needed, and could have been using for 30+ years now, was a reorganization away from a military industrial complex war machine for 600 billion a year to a civilian engineering corps to build up the country and provide a guaranteed jobs program for an order of magnitude less money.
I can't imagine how much nicer this country would have been with ~8 trillion invested in infrastructure over blowing up mud huts in deserts with "collateral" causalities in the millions while destabilizing third world nations into our next terrorist threat to point that 600 billion dollar tumor at next.
We should have seen everything from public development of high rise high density apartments in high-demand urban cores to high speed rail networks connecting major metro areas across state lines to dozens of recent-gen nuclear plants funded from the federal level down. We got none of that except a burgeoning debt and thousands with lifelong PTSD and crippling injuries from a war machine to make defense contractors rich burning taxpayer money.
I'll extend this even further: what if, after several years of all of this civilian engineering/infrastructure work being done, tons of expertise would have been built up...Then "sell" that expertise - either as a country to other countries, or as workers create their own smaller firms to look for work in other countries. Other countries would ideally hire American workers - because tons of expertise in infrastructure building - then these other countries could build up their own infrastructures, and so on, and so on....I can even imagine that our workers helping other countries (to build themselves up) might actually avoid some conflicts in the world - thereby avoiding needing such a heavy, expensive military in the first place. Ok, perhaps my premise is a little naive or idealistic...but I'm sure it would work in some pockets, and at least we (and a few other countries) would have some decent infrastructure remaining. So far, for all of our heavy, expensive, and excessive military spending, what do we have to show for it - mountains of debt, more people in the world hating Americans, our own people victims to PTSD?? President Eisenhower was correct.
China already adopted and is widely benefiting from this strategy. Their massive civil engineering corps first built up their "ghost cities" that are now populated, more high speed rail than the rest of the world, and brought the country from famine in the 70s to some of the most technically advanced development anywhere.
In the last 10 years that engineering machine got turned to foreign investments, right now China is building thousands of miles of high speed rail and skyscrapers throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. Thus getting foreign nations indebted to them not for "protection" like the US tried but for their economic lifeblood.
Its going to pay off lavishly throughout this century for the CCP. They will have billions in their debt for their engineering expertise in helping modernize all these foreign economies and not all of it will be strictly fiscal debt. They will be dependent on Chinese engineering because all the intellectual capital is held there. All the US will have to show are millions of insurgents crying death to the nation. The marginal advantage of accumulated expertise for China will be the ability to build civilizations up (to serve their own interests) while the US is only good at tearing them down (to still serve their own interests).
I can't imagine how much nicer this country would have been with ~8 trillion invested in infrastructure over blowing up mud huts in deserts with "collateral" causalities in the millions while destabilizing third world nations into our next terrorist threat to point that 600 billion dollar tumor at next.
We should have seen everything from public development of high rise high density apartments in high-demand urban cores to high speed rail networks connecting major metro areas across state lines to dozens of recent-gen nuclear plants funded from the federal level down. We got none of that except a burgeoning debt and thousands with lifelong PTSD and crippling injuries from a war machine to make defense contractors rich burning taxpayer money.
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