> Most of that money is wasted on keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy, it's not going into soldier's pockets. And I say this being pro-US and indeed seeing the world as a dangerous place.

Hi former active duty soldier here - I'm all for generally increasing pay, but you're just making claims here without any basis for them. It cost a lot of money to maintain the industries capable of producing weapons. We can stop the spending, but then they go out of business and now that capability is lost. Look at Europe. Depends on the details. What specific waste are you talking about? Here's [1] an article that came out recently highlighting how much of our explosives and munitions manufacturing is reliant on just a few locations - cut the DoD budget, and then these are the kinds of things that happen.

Secondly, you have no expertise or authority to make claims as to whether we're spending the right amount of money - whether that's too little or too much, without additional specific logic or factual claims. When you say the DoD is sucking up a trillion dollars you're implying that it's all waste - sorry don't think that's true. And when you look at the performance of equipment that other countries provide versus the US, you know our stuff actually works as advertised. Maybe the US is actually spending too little, and other countries are spending proportionally much less on vaporware?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/western-powers-race-to-brin...