Eli5: Why does the US spend so much money on military?
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Traditionally, the US did not have a standing army. When a war happened, they would train and equip regiments, and when the war ended, they would be disbanded – in peacetime it was just a rump of officers and generals. The idea was that the US could be defended by a navy.
This changed with world war 2, where the US spent an incredible amount of money and built up a large army. After the war, disarmament was slow, since Germany and Japan had to be occupied. And then the Korean war happened – which forced the US to invest even more money into the military and maintain a large army. And this entire situation transitioned into the cold war, where the US saw it necessary to keep a large military presence abroad in order to prevent something like Korea to happen again. Basically, the US was never able to take the foot off the gas in terms of military spending. And this had an impact on US industries:
During world war 2, most of the arms were produced by civilian companies converted to temporary military use. But over the years, many of the involved companies started to specialize more and more on military contracts. So where a Sherman tank was made in a car factory, a Patton tank was made in a tank factory, using tools which could not just switch back to making cars. All this led to the so called “military-industrial complex”, where a bunch of hugely influential companies are completely dependent on government contracts, and therefore will use their influence to keep spending high. On top of that, other nations reacted to the US military buildup with heavy spending of their own, such as the Soviet Union building a large navy and of course nuclear weapons.
The US was simply never willing or able to back out of this, even after the end of the cold war.
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