[yk]

Well, the US military budget can only be understood as an aesthetic statement, there is basically no scenario were the US defense budget is not vastly oversized.

The obvious counter of getting stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan, there the problem is a political, not a military one. The US forces were easily able to archive military targets, the problem is that nobody bothered to formulate clear political goals that could be archived, and consequently the western forces are stuck in limbo.