"Adequate" is not really a worthy standard for a nation leading in innovation, IMO.

The fed only pays for interstate roads (highways), though, and those are pretty good (so long as you're not comparing them to German roads, lol). Most of the shitty roads are owned and maintained on state or local levels and they're quite often shit.
I am biased. StL has some of the worst maintained roads in the country, according to various surveys.

I'd say our colleges and universities are world class, but the lower education system is extremely hit and miss. Public schools vary wildly in quality, and even charter schools and other less public options can be average at best.

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The economics of war is hard to wrap my head around.
I think of the Apollo missions and I want to say John Glen once retorted to criticism over the cost of the program by saying something to the effect of, "We didn't leave any bags of money on the moon. All that cost went to American scientists and businesses and went back into the American economy."

I know it's not a direct correlation to war costs. It's just not directly clear that spending money on bombs is a direct negative. Those people who got paid to make the bombs presumably spend their money on other American enterprises, enriching them and enabling them to innovate.

I think both Poopy and ong are making good points about this. The cost of the bombs could have gone into any research and had the same trickle-down effect on the rest of the economy. But the stability of the dollar is buoyed by our military strength. We use military strength to encourage other nations to buy into our dollar so they have a stake in keeping it stable.