It does appear the reality check is in the mail.
The Russian military is designed around defending Russia, while the Western/United States military is designed around lining the pockets of the proverbial MIC.
It doesn't take much logic to see, after the last 20, or 70 years, depending on your timeframe, that their real purpose is not actually winning wars, but spending money.
Yet why is this so? Are we all either too enthralled, or afraid to call their bluff and point out they are a bunch of buffoons and at any other time in history, even a fraction of this level of ineptitude would have had those responsible taken out and shot?
I think some deeper dynamic is going on.
Prior to WW2, the US didn't have such a monstrous military. Why didn't it go back in the box?
Consider the Federal debt has been constantly growing since the New Deal. So not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then WW2 came along, as what proved to be the greatest public works project in history and the die was cast.
You see, the banks need public debt. Money is really just an account in a ledger, so to store the asset side, you need a debt. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The military industrial complex is really just the trophy wife of the banks. They get to spend it all, without raising any questions, so more can be borrowed.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking serve as the blood and circulation system of society. When you have public government and private banking, the banks rule, because they control who can even run for office. Consequently the flunkies allowed in really only have that one job, running up the debt.
Consequently the political class have devolved over the decades, from some semblance of statesmen, to stage actors, to psychopaths, because they wield enormous power, but have no real authority, or moral responsibility. They are like delinquent children with matches.
Michael Hudson wrote a book some years ago, called; Forgive Them Their Debts; The Fall of Antiquity, about how this dynamic played out thousand of years ago and here we are stuck in the same doom loop.
Either we go back to some form of private government, as Russia and China have effectively done, with Putin and Xi as their respective CEO's, or we move onto banking as a public utility.
Though when the dollar implodes and the states have to start issuing their own currencies, foreign policy will be between California and Texas, etc, not the US and the rest of the planet.
