In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it
needs and invests instead in military "security" will eventually find
itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to
take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself,
which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as
"imperial overstretch":
"[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and
enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and
obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them
all simultaneously."
That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an
America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched
opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than
a state with an $11-trillion Gross Domestic Product and a defense budget
approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary
supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush Administration is
reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps
10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that
represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is
a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity
to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible
for that hollowing out.