I think the project warrants more respect just for its audacity. It's basically a moonshot project.
That's good considering it costs several times more than a literal moonshot ($400b vs ~$110b for Apollo in today's dollars). I would describe it as less a moonshot and more a transfer of wealth to military contractors.
FWIW the $400b figure is to buy the planes, the Pentagon estimates a further $1 trillion to maintain them.
They're not going to ever actually buy all of those planes, and the maintenance cost will be far lower accordingly.
All you have to do is look at the F22 program to understand what's actually going to happen; there are numerous other recent examples of how they tend to slash & burn on ordering however. Ten years out they'll be on to the new new thing, and they'll be slashing the purchase program toward zero accordingly.
The planes are costing $93 million per unit currently, they'll buy less than 500-600 of them across all branches of the military, that's ~$60 billion, give or take $10-$15 billion on cost inflation over 10 years. Then reduce the maintenance cost accordingly for that number versus the laughable former numbers (thousands? ha ha ha).
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...
Think of the military as the backdoor way to get basic science & technology research funded in the U.S. The American public isn't willing to directly fund basic research, but if you frame it as "We're defending you from evil threats out there", you can pay for things like computers, the Internet, GPS, rocketry, satellites, carbon fiber composites, robotics, the colonization of Mars, etc.
Yes.
> The US spends more on it's military than every other militarily significant country combined -- what are we defending against?
If women ran the world, I might agree with you; they seem to be more cooperative than men, and they don't seem to be as driven as men to prove their superiority and establish their power. (I know, it's a pair of sweeping generalizations.)
And certainly there's room for debate about specific defense expenditures, or whether overall we should cut them back or scale them up.
But there are wolves in the world; if you've read even a little history, you'll know that perceived weakness invites predation. A strong military can be a really handy thing to have around — as, sadly, the world keeps having to relearn, often at terrible cost.
Like it or not, the U.S. is the ultimate guarantor of the global order on which so much of modern life depends.
(And it's "The US spends more on its military ....")
"For scholars such as Steven Pinker, a psychologist, and Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, these are grounds for thinking that a world run by women would be more peaceful."
"But European history suggests otherwise, according to a working paper by political scientists Oeindrila Dube, of the University of Chicago, and S. P. Harish, of McGill University. They studied how often European rulers went to war between 1480 and 1913. Over 193 reigns, they found that states ruled by queens were 27% more likely to wage war than those ruled by kings."
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21722877-european-histo...