You can’t, hence institutions like our Constitution with its built in system of checks and balances.

Yeah, that was fun while it lasted.

Or better. How do we insure the election of political leaders with better judgement.

You can't, hence institutions like our Constitution with its built in system of checks and balances.

We tried your idea once. Very minimal military. Ended up with over 300,000 US dead when the people who built the bigger military went to war against us. Read some history, you might learn something.

Since you have the history book, tell me who won that war? Just curious since after our massive military buildup the only wars we've won have been against ridiculously tiny targets.

Are you sure you read that history right? I'm just saying is all...

Thats pretty obvious.
I think you make this too complicated because you ignore the obvious lessons. Bush Sr. and Clinton made wise judegements about the use of the military, Bush Jr. hasnt.

"The operative public policy question, then, is ... how do we build a force to accommodate that reality? "

Or better. How do we insure the election of political leaders with better judgement.

I was trying to say that a submarine would be a great tool for defending Taiwan from a Red China invasion, but not as useful hunting terrorists in Afghanistan. I agree that they could launch a cruise missile, but you are spending a lot of money for a launch platform that could be handled much cheaper.

There are a lot of weapons platforms that can be of some use, but that doesn't mean they are optimised. The whole point was that you shouldn't just look at the number of troops, but also at how you equip/train them and at the strategy/tactics to achieve the goal.

I hear some complain about the F-22 as not being the best weapons platform for an anti-terrorist campaign. And they are right. But for securing the air space in a more traditional war, they are great. We need to have a balance to react to the different threats.

M1EK,

How do you explain the title "Authorization for the USE of Military force". I know it would be convenient for Hillary to re-write history, but can't we deal with reality as it is, not as it would be convenient for the left?

Tlaloc,

We tried your idea once. Very minimal military. Ended up with over 300,000 US dead when the people who built the bigger military went to war against us. Read some history, you might learn something.

As far a Taiwan, there is a bit of water between it and China and subs would be vitally important if we needed to defend it, both to repell invasion forces and deny sea support.

Load of nonsense. The bipartisan consensus was for using the threat of force to make Saddam let the inspectors complete their work. And, of course, we know how that turned out.

Pure comedy gold!

The operative public policy question, then, is that since the history of the last fifteen years or so demonstrates that the United States’ political leadership will repeatedly find our national security interests served by sending troops into nasty situations abroad, how do we build a force to accommodate that reality?

No, the lesson is that if we have the military there are too many pressures to use it, so what we need to do is scale it back to the point where it really is a self defence force rather than designed for foreign invasion (as it is now).

and then pretend like it’s something that nobody knew about 5 years ago? As though such wisdom only has meaning when a conservative writes it, when the same words coming out of the mouth of a liberal as little as six months ago would have merited calls for execution live on Fox News?

Crikey, legion. Preble did as much to argue against the Iraq War as anyone. You're slandering one of the good guys.

Load of nonsense. The bipartisan consensus was for using the threat of force to make Saddam let the inspectors complete their work. And, of course, we know how that turned out.

No declaration of war. Still, even now.

Is it vital to our national security? Have we exhausted all available alternatives? Does it have a reasonable chance of achieving its stated objective at an acceptable cost?

It's also rather disingenuous to say this without also noting that a number of people tried to ask these same questions before we went into Iraq in the first place and were derided, insulted, described as traitors, terror-symps, etc., etc.

I ask you, how can Preble unashamedly write things like

No one disputes that our military is stressed, but the Army’s problems did not begin in 2003. The first Bush and Clinton administrations reduced the size of the military by roughly 40 percent after the end of the Cold War, but this smaller military has been used more times and in more places in the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall than it was throughout 45 years of confrontation with the Soviet Union.

and then pretend like it's something that nobody knew about 5 years ago? As though such wisdom only has meaning when a conservative writes it, when the same words coming out of the mouth of a liberal as little as six months ago would have merited calls for execution live on Fox News?