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I think they'll have all those things precisely because they know they're needed for strength.
It's the societies that favour weakness that are going to lag on infrastructure and research. It's not fair that some people are better at engineering, at innovating, at making new things. Stupid people can be #RealScientists too. Money should be redistributed from them to the non-productive. Everyone has positive rights, there are no responsibilities. Martially minded people are dangerous and give the ick, they need to be controlled and restrained (maybe to Harrison Bergeron levels). Lo and behold this society isn't going to last very long.
Strength is good actually, big armies are useful. What good is it to have scientists if they're whisked off by someone else? What good is it to have infrastructure if someone else marches in and takes the trains and ships? All these things are good in as far as they translate back into strength. There are ways to overstress and damage people, tradeoffs between long-term and short-term, game-theoretic considerations in many-player games... Yet strength is still good.
Iunno, I just feel like a society that talks like that is going to get critical investments very wrong. But also - the thing about strength is that once you have an army, you have to use it - or else you'll be outcompeted by the countries that didn't invest so much into strength as a terminal. Strength doesn't just allow you to defend, it requires you to attack. "If we didn't have this strength, we'd be invaded" is usually an excuse used by those countries that tend to do the invading. Meanwhile, hypothetically, your enemies have a five-country alliance of which one doesn't have an army at all, but just focuses on production. Why can they get away with that? Cause the other countries don't have to worry about that country feeling compelled to backstab them due to having invested so much into strength.
There are ways to use military power to get what you want non-violently. The US quelled the Chinese in the last Taiwan Straits crisis by sailing a carrier group in and demonstrating China's military weakness back in 1996. They blockaded Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US created a bunch of international institutions that serve US interests using military/economic power - they invented the UN for instance.
If you're strong enough you can bomb other countries with impunity like the US and Israel do in Syria.
Finally, use of strength can be profitable! Wagner's gold mines and holdings in Central Africa for instance, that's sustainable warfare. Or annexing land, that's how countries get their borders and the basis for their strength. Show me a major power and I'll show you a successful war-winner and land-annexer.
Alliances can also be a source of strength yet they are also fractious and problematic. Are all five countries equally threatened, do they take the enemy seriously? Are the weaker allies passing the buck to the stronger countries?
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