Fred Kaplan at Slate takes on our war machine:The military budget in question—not including any money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—totals $500 billion. This is roughly equal to the military budgets of all the rest of the world's nations combined. Adjusting for inflation, it is larger than the U.S. military budget at the peak of the Cold War—in fact, larger than any budget since the Korean War. Again, this is true, apart from the money allocated for the current wars. ...
...Look at the defense budget.... The Army gets $130.1 billion. The Navy (including the Marines) gets $130.8 billion. The Air Force gets $136.6 billion. This near-even divvying is no fluke or accident. It's been constant since the mid-1960s. (In no year since then has the split varied by more than 2 percentage points.) There is no principle of national-security policy that requires the money be divided this way. It would be an amazing coincidence if there were. Its origins lie in the truce that the service chiefs reached 40 years ago, and have maintained ever since, to quell the vicious internecine rivalries of the 1950s, when the chiefs battled furiously for every scarce dollar
It is for this reason that secretaries of defense and seasoned congressional chairmen rarely get entangled in procurement battles. They don't want to reignite the hellfire of interservice rivalries."
Hey, that's a good reason for the empire to go to war!