What we support and defend

[Steve Blair]

Fig leaf for on-topic-ness:

The U.S. military expanded, and I see a couple main reasons for why it's not going to shrink to anything similar as envisioned 200+ years anytime soon:
(1) A childish belief that you can go to a war of choice and be better off afterwards than you would be without

(2) An exaggerated intolerance for distant phenomenons (no matter what size; only a handful distant phenomenons have the attention, and it's about the same attention no matter Red Army or a bunch of guys with fertiliser bombs)

(3) Bureaucratic self-preservation instinct

(4) Congressional corruption of the system (exploitation of budgets as a means to funnel money to the own district/state and donors)

(5) True conservatism that prefers the status quo over the experiment of not getting involved in so much (coupled with wild fantasies about the indispensability of U.S. military power)

3 and 4 are the ones that are on-target.