The expert said, however, that much of the equipment could be used for multiple purposes, some peaceful, some not.
True, they have plans to spend the surplus on other purposes, some of which are worthy in their own right.
But, Mr. Herman said, "for security purposes, some activities that Al Qaeda engaged in were not told to everybody on the pyramid".
It's grown as big as it has because people can use it for a lot of different purposes – some that the founders probably didn't even envision," says Burns.
For example, to make the programs serve certain social purposes, some groups are included among beneficiaries even though they have not contributed for the required periods of time.
On the contrary, he contends, it is developing into a splendid new medium that shows language users at their most inventive, adapting a variety of styles for a variety of purposes, some formal, some highly informal.
For political purposes, some Republicans said, the fact that they have a plan and are trying to pass it is more important than the content of the plan or whether it actually becomes law.
These machines, commonly known as drones, are already used by the military, the police and the agricultural industry for a variety of purposes – some bloody, some benign and some seemingly designed to provoke people into quoting from George Orwell's 1984.
Many of the experiments were documented on film — some for propaganda purposes, some for research — and we have compiled some of the footage here, in "Manufacturing Madness," a companion to "Operation Delirium," my story in The New Yorker this week.
In other countries armies are used for a variety of purposes, some of them beneficient but most people in the U.S. agree that the only legitimate purpose a military establishment can serve is national defense.
For our purposes, some dimensions matter more than others.
