[littlegiantcap]

Points 2 and 4 are frankly just wrong. I know the idea of a peace loving utopia is a fun one, but claiming that there is no need for a military and just out of hand dismissing the US as "corrupt" without any quantifiable evidence is frankly just lazy and ignorant.

[RivieraKid]

I think that if every NATO country reduced their army by half, no one would really notice, even in the long run.

[littlegiantcap]

I'd say that in a pure numbers game. i.e. 1 mil to 500k troops you may be right. The military as an idea is undergoing a dramatic transformation that's been happening since the dawn of the nuclear weapon. The challenges we face now are quite different than the ones we faced throughout any other time in history. We need to look at the military like a startup of sorts. How do we tear down the big bloated corporate structure and enable to act quickly and derisively in a global battlefield where a small group of determined individuals has the ability to inflict the same amount of damage that used to take tanks and a large standing force. I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do think it's important that we acknowledge that the danger has changed not simply gone away.