I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people

I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it". I do not agree with this, and it's important to understand why I do not think it's the case. "You're going to regret it" does not the end of a war make. We have already reached the point where, for cases of conflict involving all but a few nations, we can make them regret it. Fairly easily. Yet we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? Because my proposed definition of the military was not to hurt people or make them regret picking a fight It was to make them stop fighting. I used to think the military was for blowing up things and killing people. As it turns out, you can do a helluva lot of blowing stuff up and killing people and you've got just as much of a conflict as when you started. War is not an equation to be solved by some new McNamara. It is also not a spectacle meant for some foreign national command authority. Yes, it might work that way in a very few large cases, but we know that in every case the goal is to get them to stop fighting. We are buying very expensive hardware for edge cases. These edge cases might occur. But even then, we should look at other ways of winning instead of out-spending and out-producing the other guy. We're trying to build too many expensive systems that do too many things. I don't even want to think of what force readiness looks like in some areas. As one general put it many years ago in a similar situation, we're destroying the artillery in order to have troops able to do civilian police work. What if we need the artillery? The USMC D2D ratio is heading south. F-35 is a Charlie Foxtrot. I could go on. If you stand back and look at it objectively? It ain't good.