&gt;  but not necessarily an argument in favor of taking action with it.<p>Stopping genocide is the clearest justification for &quot;taking action&quot; with a large military.<p>IMO, the issue is not that the US has a large military.  Scale is hard to judge, but the US has a ridiculously huge military. The US military is designed to fight 3 wars at the same time which seems to be vast overkill.  The #1 Air Force in the world in term of military strength is US Air Force, #2 Air Force in the world is the US Navy.  That&#x27;s vastly beyond what it takes to deal with local genocide.<p>PS: Consider the F-15 Eagle introduced in 1976 currently has a world wide 100:0 kill loss ratio in Aerial Combat, that took an insane amount of R&amp;D and training.  In fact the production is scheduled to in in 2019.  While impressive it&#x27;s hard to call that anything but overkill.