Not much. Perhaps more than your worst imagination might conjure but not much better than that.
The US military budget is a back door for all sorts of social programs with really twisted incentives (twist may vary by program, GI Bill being among the most harmless). Because the social programs are buried in a military budget, the extent to which those programs are inclusive of those on the receiving end depends largely on the size of the receiving end (e.g. was military action taken?) and the extent to which the people on the receiving end deserve any consideration at all (e.g. language around accommodating victims of war will likely be more effective than no language around accommodating customers of weapons conducting their own wars).
By and large, neither extreme is especially beneficial to those on the receiving end of being outside our borders, unless we have a fairly lax immigration posture… which, is a laughable concept at this point. And the concept of burying social programs in a military budget laughs right along with that.
I think it’s deserving of the term ironic to point out that other historical examples of programs which work this way are largely prefixed “Soviet”, or at least were aligned that way.
The US military budget is a back door for all sorts of social programs with really twisted incentives (twist may vary by program, GI Bill being among the most harmless). Because the social programs are buried in a military budget, the extent to which those programs are inclusive of those on the receiving end depends largely on the size of the receiving end (e.g. was military action taken?) and the extent to which the people on the receiving end deserve any consideration at all (e.g. language around accommodating victims of war will likely be more effective than no language around accommodating customers of weapons conducting their own wars).
By and large, neither extreme is especially beneficial to those on the receiving end of being outside our borders, unless we have a fairly lax immigration posture… which, is a laughable concept at this point. And the concept of burying social programs in a military budget laughs right along with that.
I think it’s deserving of the term ironic to point out that other historical examples of programs which work this way are largely prefixed “Soviet”, or at least were aligned that way.