American Global Power

Reading this today, a few thoughts struck me about this global hegemony thing that we've got going.  Go here and scroll all the way to the bottom, to the graph titled, "Four Star Positions."  This is the most striking visual representation of military hegemony that I've seen.  You'll note that there's a proliferation of four-star general positions during WWII, which stabilizes into the current model of combatant commands during the fifties and sixties, with a few wartime commands during Korea, Vietnam, and the current wars.  

Here's the thing:  this proliferation of generals, which corresponds to the proliferation of force round the globe, also corresponds to a series of expensive and not particularly productive wars.  Tangibly, our global military power has not corresponded to military success.  You could argue that it was a significant deterrent to the Soviets, but the USSR has collapsed into a bunch of countries trying to buy the Western dream and a corrupt Russian oligarchy.  As far as the business of fighting actual wars instead of just posturing sternly on the international stage goes, it's proven spectacularly unsuccessful.  

But if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, which is why we're having misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen.  You could make the argument, as Tom Ricks almost did, that we're involved in a regional war.  But why?  9/11 was the product of us totally ignoring the Middle East, except for its oil, and politicians and staff members in the White House totally failing to put the intelligence that they were literally handed to use.  

Can you imagine how the war in Afghanistan would have gone if some of those billions in defense spending had been invested in education, so that the population as a whole could intelligently criticize foreign policy and could see through the half-assed justifications to invade Iraq?  What if, we took a few hundred million from the defense budget and invested it in intelligence operations?  Took a few billion and invested in education, and another few billion to invest in infrastructure?  Can you imagine what we would be capable of if we were spending our money on something besides a military that doesn't win wars and (in the case of the Air Force) doesn't even use the expensive, expensive toys (F-22s) that we bought them?