Actually, if our leaders think that Georgia should join NATO, consider that NATO is a military alliance, right? Military - doesn't that involve soldiers?

Georgia's population outlook:
4473000 in 2005
2575000 in 2050
-42%

Most of the remaining population will be middle-aged or senior. Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and even Russia itself are all in the same boat. A point of no return has been reached in declining birth rates; not enough women of child-bearing age, who are interested in sanguine reproduction, to replace the dying.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, in a Washington Times article last May, stated that " Russia is facing 'demographic stress' with a population that will decline by 32 million in the next 40 years, almost one-fourth its current population of 141 million.

"To sustain its economy, Russia increasingly will have to look elsewhere for workers," he said, noting that world demographic trends — most future population growth will occur in poor and Muslim countries — means these workers will increase ethnic conflict.

"Some immigrants will be Russians from the former Soviet states. But others will be Chinese and non-Russians from the Caucasus, Central Asia and elsewhere, potentially aggravating Russia's already uneasy racial and religious tensions," he said.

U.S. intelligence officials called Russia's long-term demographic outlook "bleak," with the combination of an increasing death rate and falling birth rate causing the population to decline by an expected 10 million people by 2020.

"The working age-group will be hit particularly hard," one U.S. official said.

"NATO should've been dismantled after the Warsaw Pact collapsed." I thought so too. It seems that the great powers of the world will be forced to focus on internal unrest and social engineering, while reducing their overseas power projections to piecemeal efforts that enhance trade or very specifically strategic positions. A "big war" is unlikely (wasn't this threat why NATO was created?); expect rather steady occurrences of surgical sneak attacks, just about anywhere. UAVs and such will be all over the place.