Comment by lenerdenator
2 days ago
The entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
We should be throwing people in prison over this.
We usually wait for people to break laws and be convicted before we do that.
I'm sure we could find one. It's the military-industrial complex. It exists to facilitate corruption.
> and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.