- High wages: US spends 5x of China on its budget. However, an average soldier in PLA makes only $812/month [1]. A soldier in the US army makes more than 5 times that [2]. Some of the biggest armies the world - Russia, China and India have low wage levels.
- Economic Concessions: US "sells" security services to countries around the world. For instance, US ensures that Saudi Arabia is well protected from Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc. This costs a shitload of money. In return, Saudi Arabia spends 100s of billions of dollars in buying services from US contractors, manufacturers and defense equipment makers. In the 1980s, US was able to arm-twist Japan into accepting the Plaza Accord. In other times, it was able to get its economic visions materialize with the hidden threat of its military. US government spends billions on its allies in return for these economic concessions. China, Russia and Europe have comparatively lesser component of this.
- Reducing casualties in war through better tech: US military establishment arguably places greater emphasis on the life of its personnel more than its counterparts in Russia, China, India or Turkey. Substantial amount is spent in technology to reduce the human casualties. As you can see in the chart below, human casualties have been reducing in the wars US in involved.
- Cost of R&D: My previous university was strongly associated with US defense. All my professors had DARPA grants and Army establishment used to bring its top notch robots to our Robotics class. They spent a shit amount of money to make these highly expensive toys. US wants to keep its weapons cutting edge and have strong defense superiority in the foreseeable future. However, research is also friggin expensive. If you are content with using 20 year old technology (like many other countries do), the costs can be dramatically lower. The R&D costs also helps the scientific labs and universities busy - providing side benefits to the economy as a whole. For instance, both the Computer and the Internet came out of defense research.
- Military industrial complex: Defense is a big component of US economy and is also very core part of the global weapons economy. Thus, US spends a lot on weapons research (pushing up the defence budget) and also puts a lot of toys to show its prowess. This pays back handsomely. US weapon exports account for 40% of global weapons trade. A part of the R&D costs US military makes is got back through these sales. This also generates millions of jobs in the economy.
- Fighting wars everywhere: American people think it is their duty & responsibility to fight "tyranny" anywhere in the world. Their domestic media is extremely manipulative to this effect. For instance, in the 5 years running to 2003, I saw dozens of articles in Reader's Digest (a fairly uncontroversial magazine) about the "atrocities" of the Saddam regime. It talked about how Christians in Iraq are suffering, how democratic activists are executed blah blah blah. After the start of the war, the media just parrotted whatever it was fed by the Pentagon - without doing any independent critical analysis. But for a few Americans Presidents like Bill Clinton, who quickly realized his limitations in Somalia, most US leaders just carry out wars regardless of how winnable it is. This is because US voters continue to vote for wars.
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