The militaries of both sides, the US and Russia, have for years used the "threat" purportedly posed by the other side to bolster their claims for increased monetary appropriations for their own activities. In earlier times, perhaps this was justified, as each side perceived in the other a mortal threat. If this is no longer true, and I hope it isn't, it comes down to humbler - baser? - motivations, like "The bigger the budget one manages, the bigger one's influence and rewards". Bureaucracies tend to perpetuate themselves and to serve their own interests, and the military is just another bureaucracy. This is a foolish, wasteful, and dangerous game, always with the threat of unintended consequences. The world can no longer afford to indulge in this kind of behavior. Now, with both sides being "capitalist", both sides will be growing profit-driven enterprises whose only concern is their respective "bottom lines". Both sides need to develop institutions, like a genuinely critical free press, that can bring a higher level of perception to their respective publics as an antidote to these pernicious tendencies. As it is, I am not the least hopeful, as way too much money is to be gained on both sides by using scare tactics to frighten our unsophisticated peoples into uncritically supporting these mis-allocations of scarce resources.

i completely disagree the fact that there is no balance of power between russia and usa. its understandable military procurement and logistics assesment of both countries vary in accordance distinct anology. but one should endervour to assimilate the fact that cost of production is far less compared to usa, importantly not due to inferior quality but due to availability of resources in abundance. therefore it is equivocal to conceder the american weaponery is advanced due to bigger budget than of russia's. for instance soviet union had much more bigger military budget than the west put together, yet the americans were able to square up to ussr. today russia has the biggest stock pile of wmd.