Turns out the MIC built around the GWOT
My brother in Christ, the problem has nothing to do with GWOT. If anything, GWOT helped keep what's left of our defense industrial base on life support. The problem is absolutely, totally, unequivocally, the fault of Bill fucking Clinton.
In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election, marking an end to US Cold War spending doctrine, which HW had kept going, resulting in the absolute shitter shattering that was the 1991 Operation Desert Storm. In January of 1993, Bill Clinton was sworn in as President of the United States, and began his approach to the "peace dividend." This culminated in the secret meeting at the Pentagon in July of 1993 which has become known as the "Last Supper." Secretary of Defense Les Aspin summoned the executives of every US prime defense contractor for a dinner, before giving them the news that the United States would be voluntarily dismantling its capacity to wage war. Les Aspin told those gathered that Clinton would be freezing or ending most weapons development programs (such as the F-22, tooling destroyed and a fraction of the planned airframes built, and the B-2, same story), slashing the military budget, and suspending the "slack capacity" subsidies the US had been paying out since Eisenhower (basically you pay a company to maintain their ability to produce a ton of shit without them actually producing the shit. Keeping the staff, tooling, and facilities to produce, say, tens of millions of artillery shells a month in serial production is expensive, even if you aren't producing them, but nations need to be able to ramp up production, because in peacetime you may only need tens of thousands of rounds a year for training and replacing old stock, but in wartime you may need tens of millions, the answer is to pay a company to maintain that capability). Les Aspin told them that the Cold War was over, we had witnessed the end of history, and the peace dividend was in, non negotiable. This meeting was framed as a friendly warning, telling companies to consolidate, downsize, or find other markets.
To give you an idea of how disastrous this was, in 1992, there were over 50 prime defense contractors in the United States. Today there are 5.
