As a consumer society, we've evolved to be more responsive to advertising/marketing than actually good products/services. That's why our society has become so (over)saturated with advertising. You may design the best product in the world, but if you don't market it correctly, and no one knows about, then it doesn't really exist. Though the internet has begun changing that through the proliferation of viral marketing—and I don't mean the marketing gimmicks created by hipster "new media" advertising agencies, but rather true word of mouth.

And while I don't have any idea about the cost of marketing versus production in the movie industry, I do have some idea of the figures for the music industry. You can record a professional quality album for as little as $6000 these days. In fact, if you're a DIY kinda person, you can do it for a lot less than that. Heck, even a lot of major label artists are opting to record outside of a professional recording studio, and instead just renting out a house or warehouse and setting up their recording equipment there (and you can actually get some pretty interesting effects this way just by trying out different speaker/mic placements throughout the building). Mastering an album may cost another $3000-4000, but this can be offset sometimes by hiring a producer who does the mastering. I won't include the cost of album design and artwork since that's very variable and could be considered part of marketing. So in total, you're looking at only about $9~10k to produce the album itself.

Now, with most indie labels, you'd hire a publicist to do the majority of the marketing for you (i.e. get your music onto radio stations, get magazine reviews, get magazine/radio interviews, etc.). You might also do in-house marketing, which mainly just involves retail relations, sending out promo CDs, perhaps calling some radio stations to promote your music, submitting one-sheets, paying for magazine ads (this can run pretty high, but is more a function of the size of the label and what you can afford), etc. If you've got distribution through one of the majors (i.e. through a label group like Megaforce) then you also have other marketing/promotion options available to you, like co-op audio booths, co-op ads, etc.

Those are the usual variables/options a mid-sized indie label typically has for promoting a new album. A publicist these days seems to cost about $3000-4000 or more per month per album. A ballpark figure for ad space might be around $3000-4000 a month for a mid-sized indie, though that usually is spread amongst multiple album. And the co-op promotion campaigns through major distributors might run as low as a couple hundred dollars each, and again depends on how much or how little you want to invest in it. Our label probably spends ~$2000 a month on the options offered by our distributor, but, again, these are very rough ball-park figures as each label has their our marketing strategies. The smaller your budget, the more efficiently you're forced to use your resources, and so you might rely primarily on in-house or free marketing (like posting torrents, posting youtube videos, myspace, etc.).

For some of the larger mid-level indies, I'd be willing to bet they spend much more on marketing than on actually producing the album. And for the majors, I have no doubt that they spend far more than 3x as much on marketing as for producing the music. Of course, this doesn't include the cost of the record contract, nor does it take into account touring support in aid of promoting an album.

Uh... All think tanks, by and large, have no agenda other than shaping political discourse. The vast majority are intellectually dishonest. This is true whether you label them "conservative" or "liberal".

Now it may be that in some cases you feel that the ends justify such means. That's a separate issue. But let's not pretend that think tanks are anything other than tools for policy creation by unelected folks of all sorts. Sadly, that's the only kind of policy creation we have nowadays.

Of course, there are also all sorts of non-think-tank organizations whose only purpose is to shape political discourse (Greenpeace comes to mind, though there are others that are less extreme). So I'm not even sure why you're picking on think tanks...

Very important to note. Hell, the last time the US Army has ever had to face a lack of air superiority was in Korea. And the US Navy hasn't actually fought a serious blue water threat in all that time either.

The usual pattern in military thinking is that a system of tactics is worked out that incorporates the technology and national strengths of a given power. The system was good enough to put the people in charge where they are (or put their fathers and grandfathers there) so it's seen as a good thing. And with that much tradition and honor built up in the way things are done, nothing could possibly change it but for massive defeat on the battlefield, sometimes not even then.

The longer the peace won by the system of arms, the less likely it is that the leaders will perceive their weakness. The British refused to accept the danger posed to battleships by the torpedo. In their experience, the bigger the ship the more guns and thus the victory. They couldn't accept the thought of a smaller, almost disposable opponent capable of obliterating the larger, more expensive component. There had not been a shock like this in Europe since the crossbow. A proper longbow like the English used required a lifetime of training. A knight was ruinously expensive to train and equip but heavy cavalry was considered the king of the battlefield. But a crossbow meant any rude peasant with a weekend's training had the potential of taking out a knight. This was a threat to the very social order! Thus crossbows were banned from the "christian battlefield" for the longest time. You could use them against heathens but not against fellow believers.

Cruise missiles have made carriers very expensive floating targets. The Navy refuses to accept it, just like they refused to accept the power of the airplane. If not for WWII, battleships would still be seen as the center of the fleet's striking power to this very day.

The ruskies were a continental power, not a maritime one. They did not need to control the sea lines of communication, only deny them to their enemies. Soviet naval doctrine was based around this. Their ships were ridiculously overgunned (well, overmissiled) and were considered to not have as good of sea-keeping characteristics as British and American ships. But their whole point was to act as ship-killers. So no long overseas deployments, no long patrols. The subs were meant to be the far-ranging vessels and they were loaded with all sorts of carrier-killing missiles. Their heavy bomber fleets were built with the same intention.

If you sunk every merchantman in the Soviet fleet, they'd get by. Contrast this with the US. We're a maritime nation and the sea lanes are the veins through which our economy flows. We need oil, we need raw resources. At this point, we don't make shit in this country and depend on imports for some embarrassingly essential shit. If we don't control the sea, we die.

Towards the end of the Soviet Union was looking to construct proper carriers. This signaled a change in doctrine towards naval power projection. The USSR fell before this could be carried to fruition.

In this day and age, with our current technology, it would appear that the defense has the advantage on the high seas. An adage from the era of Nelson is "a ship's a fool that fights a fort." The obvious wisdom here is that a fort cannot be sunk whereas a ship can. Bad enough when the range of effective fire is measured in yards, far worse today when range is measured in hundreds or thousands of miles. A destroyer is far more vulnerable than a missile platform on shore, a carrier more vulnerable than an airbase. Between airborne and spaceborne detection systems, surface ships cannot hide. In a proper high tech war, the seas would be swept clean of ships and the only vessels with a chance of survival would be subs. This would be akin to the stalemate through most of WWI where both sides struggled to find a method of attack superior to entrenched defenses protected by barbed wire, artillery and machine gun. A lot of men died proving you couldn't beat the new technology simply by doing it the old way with more vigor.

The primary reason why this issue has not come to a head is because we do not currently face a scenario where two major technological superpowers could go to war. Even the most likely scenarios involve regional conflicts between regional powers.