Fallow highly recommends reading "America's Defense Meltdown" (pdf). Here's a bit from Chapter 11: Understand, Then Contain America's Out-Of-Control Defense Budget:

...it is not that the defense budget adequately supports our irrelevant, even counterproductive forces. For that to be the case would be a significant improvement. Instead, to promote armed forces that fight the wrong type of war in the wrong places  liberals, moderates and conservatives in the Pentagon, Congress, think tanks and the White House have over time constructed an edifice that makes our forces smaller, older and less ready to fight, all at dramatically increasing cost. And, we have done so with a system that, quite literally, does not know  or apparently care  what it is doing.

There are 271 more pages where that came from. It's just as well we face no serious global rival, isn't it? Fallows says, " Read these between football games over the weekend. You won't be sorry."

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