Military industrial complex mortaging our future?

Today, our government voted to raise the debt ceiling to allow our country to borrow more money to finance its operations. This should give any American resident reason to pause to ponder, what is our government spending money on? Under our current leadership, military spending has become the largest non-discretionary chunk of government spending, over $449 billion dollars!
We as a nation need to critically ask ourselves, do we really need to feed the military machine half a trillion dollars every year?
Clearly, after 9/11, the military industrial complex has seen an opportunity to force our country to open its checkbook. Any leader who proposes cutting our defense budget would easily be branded as weakening our country against potential terrorist attacks. But let us not forget what happened to us on 9/11 - we were not attacked by foreign fighter planes or bombs, we were attacked by terrorists who used our domestic airplanes as weapons, using box cutters and other implements to hijack the planes.
If we had enough information about such plans, we could have twarted them. No number of stealth fighters, F-18s, tanks, or other tools of the modern military machine could have easily changed the course of 9/11 - just a little information and intelligence could have.
We as a country need to stop letting our military industrial complex control the fate of our nation's finances. One could argue that the old Soviet Union's collapse was brought about through excessive military spending. We do not want our nation to meet a similar fate.