Think Again: The Pentagon. By Thomas P. M. Barnett. Foreign Policy, March/April 2013.
The military’s Chicken Littles want you
to think the sky is falling. Don’t believe them: America has never been safer.
Barnett:
Please
remember amid all this frenetic scaremongering that the Pentagon is never more
frightened about our collective future than when it’s desperately uncertain
about its own. Given the rising health-care costs associated with America’s
aging population and the never-ending dysfunction in Washington, we should
expect to be bombarded with frightening scenarios of planetary doom for the
next decade or two. None of this bureaucratic chattering will bear any
resemblance to global trends, which demonstrate that wars have grown
increasingly infrequent, shorter in duration, and diminished in lethality. But
you won’t hear that from the next-warriors on the Potomac.
