Why the world's biggest military keeps losing wars
Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, but almost always also a fight to maintain spheres of influence. This was certainly true for the Vietnam war, where above all a communist Indonesia had to be avoided, but also obviously for any conflict in the Middle east.<p>What I find worrying is that the War on Terror is a poor substitute for the Cold War. The enemy is technologically unsophisticated, so there is no chance of a sputnik shock, no real competition to gain the upper hand technologically and therefore potentially less incentive to use the vast resources of the military to fund high technology research as it was the case during the Cold War.<p>Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.