emphasis on "kinda", because while it is the case that military programs are taking up industrial capacity that could hypothetically be used for production that benefits the broad American population, their programs in Israel and Ukraine aren't just the US having some "fun" abroad and forgetting to care about things at home - they are directly and initimately linked to the US's imperial power, and projecting that power, which is partially what has allowed America to have such a good standard of living and cheap prices at all (well, less so in the last decade or two of course). Of course profit is a major motivator too, and if anything it now appears that the profit motive and the imperial motive are actually becoming detached and want to go in different directions, as arms companies just wanna sell shitty overpriced gizmos regardless of whether they actually do anything, whereas the US government and other sections of the bourgeoisie are reliant on maintaining their imperial stranglehold.

the contradictions are heightening, one of them being that Western arms companies want to sell as little equipment as possible, as expensively as possible, and use the least amount of effort and money making that equipment as possible, which leads to the shittification that we have observed in Ukraine and now in Israel. whereas Western government and, for example, Western resource extraction companies want to have as much military equipment as possible, for as cheaply as possible, to maintain their monopolies and colonies. but they also want to spend as little as possible on training soldiers and building barracks, hence that recent article by the Quincy Insitute on how barracks are just awful places for US soldiers (based lmao). contradictions everywhere.

conservatives recognise none of this of course, and merely made that meme thinking that Chicago and Los Angeles and New York City are under constant Antifa patrols and everything is on fire, and that the Mexican border is guarded by communists who are secretly letting immigrants in to destroy America, and that all these ammo could be used to kill migrants and brown people to fix things. the liberal worldview in general just treats every single event and thing that ever happens as disconnected data points, and where events are connected, it's usually to say that things have weird, esoteric causes (e.g. "wokeism in the military is why we are losing in Ukraine") rather than anything remotely systemic, let alone all-encompassing like communist theories like Marxism are

Doing healthcare and education and bin collection at home is fucking boring. War is the hot exciting thing that all the cool politicians are doing.

More accurate would be citizens of Palestine and Russian speakers in the Donbas at the bottom.