The United States spends more on its military than any other country in the world, with a yearly budget of $801 billion as of 2021.  

What are we spending this absurd amount of money on? Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, which was established in 1967, citizens are able to get a glimpse of at least some of the military projects their tax money has been going towards. (See the other countries spending the most on war.)

The results are not always something for the military to be proud of. Some of its initiatives have been downright strange, and ultimately prove unworkable and get canceled. Using a variety of military-focused and news sources, 24/7 Tempo has compiled a list of the weirdest canceled U.S. military projects. Some of these never made it beyond the drawing board, while others were created but not used in the field. 

Click here to see the weirdest canceled military projects

Flying saucers, cyborg spy cats, and even a “gay bomb”…. The American military-industrial complex (to use a phrase coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961) has tried it all. They may say that “All’s fair in love and war,” but some of these projects raise serious ethical concerns – particularly those that used animals as weapons and experimented on human test subjects. Along with ethical concerns, there is the issue of price, with some of these projects costing billions of dollars and producing no viable results. (These are the failed weapons the U.S. wasted the most money on.)