Fielding a viable military, as one example, does require some amount of discipline in your troops. Fielding a 21st century military will require even more of it, if the model predicted by the Rand company I read about in a book on Special Operations is anything to go by. (Small teams that group together to complete objectives and then disband to avoid becoming a target.)
Except that society doesn't need every single citizen in the military. Even we Israelis only need most people in the army for a few years rather than going to total war.
It's true in lots of work situations besides the military. Also, taking turns to let other people speak and doing things in an orderly fashion is the basis of legislative and court proceedings, as well as more basic things like not driving your car on the sidewalk or ignoring red traffic lights. My personal opinion is that humans in groups tend to engage in lowest-common-denominator behavior by default, and hierarchical structures are useful for preventing crowds from degenerating into mobs.
I don't see any actual links between being able to run a competent government, being able to drive properly, and being inculcated to have "sit down and shut up" as your chief response to most of life.
Many nations cannot "field a viable military." We'd be $2Trillion richer if we lacked the ability to go on military adventures on the far side of the planet. Orienting education around such a goal seems misguided.
No we wouldn't. Where do you think that money goes? Salary to Americans. The money moves in a circle.
We would be somewhat richer (broken window fallacy in play), but it would be a small fraction of the nominal number. And the fraction is even smaller if you realize that in some cases you are taking people who are doing nothing, and giving them a job (so the broken window fallacy doesn't apply to them).
1. The wars were 100% borrowed money. Every dollar spent was borrowed.
2. The wars produced nothing. Zero value. Not even any cool technology we overpaid for. A complete waste.
The wars literally increased the debt and associated economic drag on us and our children and their children by $2T in debt.
We would, therefore, be literally $2T richer. Not all of it was paid to Americans, but of the amount that was, every penny will be taxed out of us and paid back with interest. Pure drag and deadweight.
