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The U.S. Military in the recent past and in the near future
Once again lacking inspiration, I thought I'd share a quotation I came across several months ago when reading Dmitri Orlov's Reinventing Collapse:
The lesson that the United States desperately needs to learn is that their trillion-dollar-a-year military is nothing more than a gigantic public money sponge that provokes outrage among friends and enemies alike and puts the country in ill repute. It is useless against its enemies, because they know better than to engage it directly. It can never be used to defeat any of the major, nuclear powers, because sufficient deterrence against it can be maintained for relatively little money. It can never defuse a popular insurgency, because that takes political and diplomatic finesse, not a compulsion to bomb far-away places.
Now, it's arguable that our overwhelmingly superior military does serve a valid purpose indeterring large-scale military conflicts, but it's an awfully high price we pay for such a dubious gain. I suspect, though, that Obama gets this, and don't expect him to fall into the liberal trap of trying to out-military the right-wing hawks just to avoid appearing "weak." He got to where he is speaking the rhetoric of engagement and diplomacy, so I sincerely expect that he will follow through in the same line. It will be interesting to see how--or if--the military evolves under President Obama. Or, more precisely, how "national security," broadly speaking, will be defined under Obama.