Status Updates From The Changing Face of Empire...

The U.S. military devours money and yet delivers little in the way of victories. Its personnel may be among the most talented and well-trained on the planet... and when it comes to defense budgets, it far outspends the next nine largest nations (most of which are allies) combined... but in the real world of warfare this turns out to add up to remarkably little.

Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army", today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

[The U.S. is] inundated with hundreds of thousands of recent veterans... suffering from service-related disabilities... no wonder the current combination of special ops, drones, spy games, civilian soldiers, cyberwarfare, and proxy fighters sounds like a safer, saner brand of war-fighting... the new light-footprint Obama doctrine actually seems to be making war an ever more attractive and seemingly easy option...