Reply #8: It's working for them

[Alcibiades]

The crazy thing is that you hear folks all the time complaining that various other countries do not spend enough on "defense" (read: war), never seeming to understand that we are the outlier. In economic terms, you might as well be dumping the money and burning it.

Real defense would entail something more like what the Chinese have, without the expensive doo-dads required of a global empire. Meanwhile we can't get out of Afghanistan, a country of 28 million, which makes it the size of three or four mid-sized Chinese cities. Even with a military budget one tenth of ours, I guess we couldn't successfully occupy china, either.