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Mr. Wheeler's book 'The Wastrels of Defense' is now twenty years old, but is still provides marvelous insight into how jacked-up Congress was (and is) insofar as the defense budget is concerned. He worked on the staffs of both Republican (Javits, Kassebaum, Domenici) and Democrat (Pryor) Senators, so he had a close view of how the sausage is made. Well worth a read.

Winslow T. Wheeler, 2004, The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security, Naval Institute Press, 278 pages

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When you design your MIC to mainly enrich existing billionaires, better hope you don't have to fight any actual wars against a peer opponent.

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Interesting point. This is pretty much what Emmanuel Todd said as long go as 2002 in “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order” (London: Columbia University Press, 2003). In sum, that the US’s military had only fought small military forces since WW2 and had mostly lost those confrontations.

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