It only deserves respect if you believe the military deserves respect. The US spends more on it's military than every other militarily significant country combined -- what are we defending against? Besides a drop in stock price for Lockheed Martin.
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...