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Notes -
Concurring with you, I think military spending serves three roles: a) Buying stuff to win a war b) Fostering industries which produce such stuff long term c) Economic stimulus / gravy train
For (a), it does not matter where you buy, as long as they are not your likely enemy.
For (b), you want a reliable long term partner country.
For (c), there are likely key areas and companies where you want to spend money to win the next election. Basically, military spending is a money hose which you can redirect to wherever you see the biggest political advantage.
How important these various considerations are depends on the situation your country finds itself in: if Ukraine had money to spend, they would likely buy whatever gets them the most bang for their buck, while Canada is not expecting to fight an existential war where the raw number of jeeps matter any time soon.
Regarding (c), it should also be pointed out that big military projects are almost never developed in a healthy market situation. A healthy market would be that a NATO country company which wants to develop a new fighter jet will do so based on venture capital. If a decade later, it turns out that their jet is competitive, they then sell it to NATO countries, making a profit for their investors.
Instead, the typical process seems to be to first convince your government to pay for the development. If they are lucky and your project does not fail ten years in, it will be likely arrive delayed, over budget and possibly under specs. In a (c)-heavy world, this does not matter: your government will mostly buy from you even if an ally offers a superior product, because why would they subsidize the economy of an ally instead of their own?
It should surprise nobody that this socialist model of weapon development is not very efficient, especially as companies evolve to latch onto the government apparatus, extracting that sweet sweet revenue stream as their tentacles drill deeper into the administrations as decades pass by.
On the other hand, not everything can be reasonably developed in a competitive market. If Roosevelt had in 1941 simply announced the US intend to buy nukes and let venture capital fund competing Manhattan Projects, the result would likely not been that in 1945 the US could just pay 1% of its GDP for Little Boy and Fat Man.
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