Please.

America has always prided itself on having a civilian army, small in peacetime and increasing to meet a threat. Look at the shape of the military after WWI and prior to WWII. You want to talk about "gutted". It's supposed to be small in peacetime.

Second, there is not a political vacuum when it comes to these things. There just wasn't the political will for a large military when there was no credible threat. NO one would have suggested an enormous military then. There was no political will for a fight against terrorism - Clinton declared "war on terrorism", and there was no jumping on the bandwagon.

Had Clinton gone for huge military expenses folks like you would have been pointing out the boondoggles, how California hadn't been invaded, or Hawaii bombed, for a long time.

Third, had there been large military expenses, the surplus would have been smaller, the confidence in the economy smaller, the long-term interest rates would have been higher, and the economy wouldn't have grown the way it was able to.

Fourth, the military, even had it been larger back then, would have done what it has always done, prepare to fight a military just like itself. And that's not the threat. The threat now is not a nation with borders and not an army with uniforms. There isn't anything to occupy, and while the B-52s may have been effective as tactical weapons, they clearly weren't ideal. From what I read, "friendly fire" from bombing killed as many allies as any other thing.

We are trying to fight hatred, ideas, and religious conflicts with hatred, B-52s, helicopters, and Special Forces. And in some ways we're trying to fight a fire by blowing it out. If it works, fine, and we may put out flames here and there. If it doesn't work, we may have just fanned it.

For instance, we've done the best we could in Afghanistan, spent billions, marshalled everything we could, and we don't have Osama or many, many of the Taliban or al Qeada. I don't know what each dead "enemy" has cost, but it's been a whole bunch. And it looks as if more got away than we got. That may be a successful military operation, may have slowed down activities against the North American continent, but hasn't led to "success" such as with Germany or Japan, or even Iraq. We haven't changed the minds or hearts of the "enemy", though we may have slowed them down. No one even claims to have cut off the head of "terrorism".

Our military, through no fault of their own, is ill-prepared to carry out the operations necessary for "victory" against the kind of enemy with which it is now engaged.

And we may have left behind more hostility than we eliminated. Previously style of successful warfare has involved occupation over time, and reconstruction leaving behind a population which has hope for it's future. What we're leaving behing in Afghanistan is a central government in Kabul with no real power. The hatred in the hills is still in the hills, and, as we've seen from bombings and rocket attacks, coming close to the cities.

A parallel might be WWI and Germany. Germany was embittered, saddled with war reparations, and had no economic hope. The way was paved for Hitler.

Nope. You can't blame Clinton, you can't blame Bush, or the military. Times change, and change is painful. The US is in the midst of it now, and we seem to be fighting for time until we can find the formula. And it may be a fight for minds and hearts rather than body counts which wins this one.

Arf