Essentially the US arms industry is a poorly implemented government jobs program with no sustainable or most of the time even tangible return on the investment. The reason the Navy is getting new LCSs which are giant pieces of shit that no one really wants and doesn't really fit our current threat analysis (and certainly not our future one either) is because it creates jobs in the deep south. The same goes for the new version of the Abrams, the US Army already has a shit ton of M1A2s that were upgraded with TUSK and CROWS during Iraq but now congress has implemented plan to build a bunch of even more improved Abrams, which the Army doesn't even want or need.
There are some programs that are legitimate boons to both defense and jobs (like keeping the Air Force tanker replacement program, which is needed and serves a wide array of our allies, in the US and awarding it to Boeing not Airbus), but a lot of them are just a way to basically provide welfare through jobs with out looking like a lefty to your constituents (god forbid that money be spent employing people to engineer new bridges, build them, and fix the rest of our crumbling infrastructure).
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