Agreed about being in the military helps with job skills. There are few in the military with the entitlement attitiude. The ones in the military use team work.Future value, if real interest rates drop too much because of supply (caused by deflation) then people may simply decide that the present value is worth more than the banks can compensate for in interest rates. The thing is that their infrastructure doesn't really need (or didn't need) improvement because it was already well-maintained (unlike ours) and thus (my belief) is that they turned the public works. Depending on the type of work they did public works programmes might not even serve to maintain job skills (which deteriorate with time if unemployed long enough). Where being in the military adds to your job skills, and can potentially exponentially add to your opportunities to develop higher-levelled skills (entirely based on the country, but here in America if you're a vet you get very hefty educational bonuses). As well bombs don't have to be made by the government, they can be government-demand driven but private-produced like the American Air Force. This also goes with the expansion of military bases which, again depending on the country, can mean that private contractors are brought in which directly helps the private sector. You have this 'crowding out' effect, where money becomes more expensive for the private sector because the government is driving up demand (which increases prices) and thus possible entrepreneurial activities are stopped from ever occurring, but when you're in a liquidity trap or just have stagnant/declining aggregate demand then you don't have to worry about that because there's nothing significant to crowd out.
EDIT:
Additionally, they /already/ were willing to spend the money on inefficient public works (the same folly of the New Deal) what I'm proposing is that there's certain sectors that the government can use that are more relatively efficienct than others.
Hire the vet.
