Initial Officer Selection

[ganulv]

I was looking at Europe in regard to Portugal.
The nearest it came to real troubles post-Napoleon was when the Allies wanted the Azores as base for the 2nd Battle of the Atlantic.
In case of Portugal, a minimum amount of deterrence (merely enough military to be acknowledged as a sovereign nation) did work.

I think a lot of the disagreement over the last couple of days on this thread might boil down to the fact that your framework assumes that a military’s job is defense of borders against incursion by neighboring national forces (correct me if I am wrong). This is just not and probably never will be the whole of the job description of the U.S. Military. Since WW2 ended it has been a purveyor of American hegemony (not saying that American hegemony is good or bad, just that that role seems uncontestable to me) and it plays a role in U.S. counterterrorism efforts.* I personally think the military should never be conceived of as the main institution for CT as in prevention—civilian intelligence agencies and the Coast Guard are the institutions I think of as the foilers of terrorist plots, and I for one do believe we should take seriously the notion that the State Department can play an important role in ameliorating conditions that foster terrorism (but do fully acknowledge that such an assertion is open to plenty of critiques)—but I don’t see why the U.S. would ever want to remove its military’s role in responding to acts of terrorism.

*I try to use a term other than ‘terrorism’ whenever possible for a variety of reasons, but here I mean it as shorthand for “non-state actor perpetrated paramilitary violence.” Or something like that…