Depends what they are using it for.
BAMCIS!
That is the perfect answer. But, the problem is that a vast portion of "military" money goes to contractors within the Defense Industry and they prefer to build technological toys that have nothing to do with any real world practical threat in which the military would use them. Oh, but these master toy builders aren't to blame solely. We have politicians who's real crime is that they are stupid beyond belief...
* The most appalling example would be the F/A-22. This is an Air Force jet fighter toy designed to fight the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall came down, arming it with a few smart bombs in order to support ground troops kept the program alive. To this day....never used. Enough on that I think.
* Boeing was providing a new generation of refeuling aircraft to the Air Force and this was based on outright fraud. A senior civilian offocial on the Air Force staff, Darlene Druyun, sweetened the already inflated contract by several billion dollars for the promise of a $250,000-a-year retirement job, along with jobs for her relatives. Secretary of the Air Force James Roche directed a campaign to mislead other officials and Congress into his part of the contract deal and he later resigned. One Boeing executive, Michael M. Sears, went to prison for hyis role. In the end, it was discovered that the contract was about helping Boeing keep an unprofitable assembly line open. The last thing the Air Force needed was new refuleing aircrafts. And the reason this was caught was because a few senators (John MCCain,Phil Gramm, John Warner, Joseph Lieberman, and others) refused to be swayed like the other idiot senators who swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
To it's credit the U.S. Army cancelled the Comanche attack helicopter as unaffordable. Besides being unaffordable, with the Apache flying high and hard in support of ground troops in the Army and the Marine Corps, who needs the Comanche? The Army leadership behaved responsibly. And even more to their credit they stuck to their guns even after the tearful contractors lobbeyed and convinced select politicians that the Army "needed" it.
The Marines have always been excallent stewards of tax payer dollars and the Coast Guard does more with less than any comparible organization. Deprived of a Soviet enemy, the Navy and the Air Force question their purpose and their doctrines. The Navy has it's place in the "War on Terror" because they are far more than ocean bound. But the Air Force has become an organization of tinkerers and experimentation for technological toys.
When people jump on the band wagon and ask why our troops have no body armor or why their NBC suits have duct tape on them to seal them or why our UAV video feeds are lacking in cryptology, they don't bother to scratch the surface. There is plenty of money. The problem is that they see no money to be made in investing in the troop. Politicians are constantly fooled by the contractor's line "nothing is too good for our troops." This is certainly true, but what they give us is not good enough. Our enemy spends a hundred bucks to produce a media saavy IED and rides donkeys in the mountains. We spend billions on an F/A-22 (and don't use it) and begrudgingly hand out body armor to expendable troops.
What you stated..."it depends on what they are using it for"...seems to stop at the Senate door to the delight of Generals and Admirals who seek future positions in the Defense Industry. And this isn't a problem we've always had. This is a problem created after the Cold War ended and we lost that comfortable Red threat as an enemy. The next threat, "China," was on the lips of every defense contractor ever since. The habit that Washington and the Defense Industry had gotten themselves into because of this "next threat" had been a focus on building toys to fight a war they want us to fight rather than focusing on the wars our troops are fighting.
Horrible waste of money.
..as is racism..
