Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.