Crafty politician that he is, Obama was smart enough to set low enough standards for his administration to claim 'victory' by the summer of 2011 or so.
Is there anything about cyberspace that particularly screams Air Force? Not really. If cyber warfare is going to be as all-encompassing as it's made out to be by its vigorous proponents, then it will disseminate throughout the services even more than the drone phenomenon has.
The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.
If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man - save highly polluting coal.
We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.
China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake.
Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Homeland defense doesn't generate any force requirements beyond having enough National Guard to save lives in natural disasters and to baby-sit nuclear power plants on Code Red days.
To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.
America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it's hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed - especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.
The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole, and they want to kill something.
Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the 'per billions' of passengers.
Transnational terrorism, in the form of the Salafi Jihadist movement, is fundamentally a function of globalization.
An economically confident America has - since becoming a world power at the start of the 20th century - tended toward global engagement. It is during times of economic stress (1930s, 1970s) that America has become more withdrawn.
