Here are a couple of clarifying notes to the essay: 1) the United States has not declared any wars. The last war we were in was in the 1940s, over 70 years ago

Here are a couple of clarifying notes to the essay: 1) the United States has not declared any wars. The last war we were in was in the 1940s, over 70 years ago. Since then we've done "police actions" "limited military engagements", and all sorts of other nonsense, but no wars. 2) Yes, there's too much emphasis on the wrong things. But there's a huge problem here that the military is working through: what do you want your military to do, anyway? The general consensus is that we want these highly-sophisticated fighting units able to take a fight to other highly-sophisticated militaries, like the Russians or the Chinese. But guess what? That's not the fight we've had. So we keep spending trillions of dollars for a military built to do one thing, and then we keep asking it to do something else. You might think the answer would be "Just re-factor!", but it's not. As it turns out, if you want B2 stealth bombers, you gotta have this huge industrial complex churning away for decades to get them. You can't just turn it off and on. If there's ever a fight requiring high-tech military versus high-tech military, all of that prep will pay off. If there isn't? It still might have been worth it -- having it in place could have prevented the fight. You don't know. The real problem is that the Pentagon and various administrations are unable to have an honest discussion about the issues. There are too many lucrative contracts and jobs on the table. The risks are too great to boil down into slogans. For now, my recommendation is to form a new branch of service dedicate solely to large numbers of low-tech groud-pounders who specialize in nation-building and international rescue/response. Whether we like it or not, that's what we keep ending up doing, and the existing services do not seem to be able to mentally make the trade between one bomber and, say, 100K peacekeepers. Plus the missions are vastly different.