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It's the America you paid for. Three trillion dollars on a decade of war does not just vanish, it does not stay abroad. Demobbed soldiers, private training and supply companies, attitudes and expectations - they have to go somewhere, do something, affect someone.

You have the America you paid for.



This has nothing to do with war.


lifeisstillgood is talking about the cultural expectation that problems are solved by throwing overwhelming force at them.


True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level.

the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.

All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system)

It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")


>True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level.

That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war.

>the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.

All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.


>There's no such thing as an overreaction in war.

There is when we (a) don't know who the enemies are and (b) live in a post-Geneva world where the international consensus is that yes, there are lines that can never be crossed.


a) We knew who the enemies were. We let civilians out of the city before it was attacked.

b) We didn't gas or nuke them. In terms of the amount of conventional firepower you can bring to bear on enemy combatants... there's no limit.




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