Note also absent from the defense spending budget is actual necessary gear for the troopers, such as proper helmets that protect from IED concussions and proper treatment from the DVA for TBI, of which we have hundreds of thousands of cases thanks to twenty years of War on Terror.

Recruits are entirely expendable, according to how our budgets are allocated, which is one of the primary points of counter-recruitment. Roll a D20 for every year of your term, and on a critical fumble, you either die or, way more likely, sustain a life-ruining wound. And those are the ones they count rather than PTSD cases they send back into the fray, the rape cases they make disappear or the troopers who wash out because a senior officer has a personality conflict with them and deigns to personally make their lives a living hell until they break.

In my own work with vets, all these stories have been commonplace, not just isolated incidents.

So yeah, if we're not going to treat our troops like human beings worthy of life, we can assume defense dollars are going to the cigars that Lockheed-Martin lobbyists hand out to our Senators to celebrate new contracts.