America: paranoid or proactive?

Ever since I was a boy I've idolized the military. I come from an incredibly military-oriented family, with every male in my family serving in an armed conflict dating all the way back to the American civil war. As you can guess, I was raised with the flag on my back. Everything I learned growing up had something to do with being proud of my country and proud of my heritage. Don't get me wrong, I am proud of this country, immensely so. Mostly for the reason that if I were to write something like this in some other countries, I'd disappear from my home overnight and end up in some gulag in a country whose name I couldn't pronounce. My fault with this country is it's so called "military industrial complex." This is the term that is used to describe a country in which a significant amount of jobs, work hours, and money goes into the national military. America definitely fits the bill. Since 2001, this country has spent more than 1.5 trillion dollars on wars and armed conflict. Surely there are more important things to spend our excess-money-that-we-don't-have on. Yes I could start debating the necessity of every conflict in this decade, but that's the point in the conversation where politicians get lost in a rather heated, rather useless debate. No, I just have a simple question to ask. It's probably one that won't get answered until some apocalyptic national catastrophe, but it's one that interests me nonetheless. Is America just being paranoid, or is there a justifiable reason for this military industrial complex? Surely people would argue that we have enemies that we need to guard against. But would those enemies even be there in the first place if it weren't for our overzealous military "world policing?" In my opinion, it's a classic example of a problem cycling into another problem. I'm not saying we should stop spending the money. I'm not saying we should keep spending the money. I'm simply saying that we need to put politics aside. We need to stop focusing on our pride in this country and start focusing on the reality of where we're headed. Hubris is a reoccurring flaw in classic mythology. It's essentially a case of pigheadedness. The hero gets a big head and ends up shooting himself in the foot. In America's case, we have a trillion dollar gun pointed at our big toe.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/
-its a biased site, but it works

http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison
-also biased, but the numbers are there