We’d also worked out that wars against people and in places like Afghanistan and Iraq often prove just how much shallow bullshit powers with vastly inflated ideas re-their innate superiority in relation to other states can spout.

In both conflicts US high-tech and firepower have led merely to stalemates that are but preludes to defeat.And persisting to utter defeat as the US intends to do will rightly draw world attention to the nation’s propensity for sheer irrationality and poor judgement.

Bacevich appears not to have noticed that the enemies the US is fighting couldn’t care less what it spends on weaponry and manpower.The US has lost all the wars it chose to fight against persistent guerillas with cheap,light weapons who can decentralise and hide.

The military system described by Bacevich is designed less to win wars against such enemies as to meet the demands and pretensions of the aerospace, armaments and now private security companies that constitute the MIC.Capital intensive warfare and the expensive weaponry that goes with it can promote domestic economic wellbeing but can do nothing to assist in solving the immense political difficulties Washington encounters by choosing to wage war in the first place.

Moreover the US has never been able to prove to itself or demonstrate to anyone else the long-term relevance of such weaponry to any of the many conflicts it has chosen to initiate.

The level of myopic political and cultural ignorance that is so patently evident across the American military and political leadership means their capacity for any form of protracted warfare is quite limited.Since time is never on the US side with each year that passes and each consecutive futile escalation their adversaries through superior ingenuity and organisation develop the ability to neutralize all the advantages in firepower the US thought made them omnipotent.

In the final analysis US success in the projection of its miltary power is wholly dependent on the viability of the governments it has installed as its client regime.These rarely transcend their economic dependency and surrogate status let alone survive any length of time.

Similarly US freedom to act elsewhere,as Georgia has found to its cost,is greatly constrained by the demands made upon its financial capacity by the current wars of attrition it has initiated.