Jimmy Carter pointed out we have only enjoyed sixteen years in our history when we were not engaged in a conflict or war. We are the most waring country on the planet and have been since our existence. Our hypocrisy is unmatched in history.

YUp and meanwhile them there aliens are soaking up their California sunshine on Vacation till all the kerfuffle dies down back home in the desert.

USA has been invading the homelands of others every year since 1776.....Remember the Alamo is the pattern of big lie when truth is Mexico was defending their own San Antonio from invading slave merchants....people who rape black women to sell their babies......Remember the Maine was staged to conquer the entire Spanish Empire expanding the so called Monroe Doctrine to Phillipines Hawaii Cuba by murderous McKinley battleships and Marines....General Smedley told the truth about the USA "racket" war crimes for what is now Dole&Chiquita Banana "republics".....FDR let Japs attack boy Bush let his oil buddies attack 9/11 daddy Bush refused the conference call with Arab nations to prevent Saddam invading Kuwait.....daddy BushWACKER family bank rolled Hitler until October 1942.....I am deeply ashamed of USA illegal wars and CIA murder of people like Mossadeq & Allende ....Eisenhower 1960 warnings were too little too late when he could have vetoed all those killings 8 years earlier TrumpOLINI is shuffling his cards for a bigger lie to start war with Iran because he is too stupid to cover for USA murders in Ukraine, Yemen and Palestine

How silly! Only in the age of the Internet and social media!

I don't know if you remember the Cold War...

The point of having the military was (and is) deterrence. It is maintained in the hopes that we will NOT have to go to war. For the same reason a homeowner keeps a dog in the yard, to warn people that the house is defended.

Our military grew and stayed big after WW2 because our allies in Europe were so exhausted by their war effort, that we feared an attempt by Russia to conquer all of Germany and then the rest of Europe (their public doctrine was that communism should liberate the world, after all). Our military took up a defensive posture inside Germany as well as occupying the country, since nobody was sure that the Nazi Party didn't just go underground only to surface again in a few years. Similarly, our treaty with Japan forbade them all but a skeleton armed force; we occupied their nation as a defense but also to monitor against a resurgence of their military. In hindsight, we need not have worried; but that's with hindsight.

One might just as well ask why the USSR and China needed such huge militaries. No side felt they could be the one to back down and show a perceived weakness; it might invite military adventures (like the Cuba missile crisis, which nearly became WW3). Every party to the arms race felt they had to maintain parity with the others.

Many thousand South Koreans would disagree, by the way, that there was no need for the United States to use our military in a defensive posture. Defending our allies has been a vital role. If not for American (and allied) troops, it's almost certain that the North would have tried by now to invade again, with disastrous results, win or lose, for both sides.

I am not defending nor would I defend every use to which our military has been put. But there is such a thing as just war, and we have engaged in them from time to time. Opposing force with force is sometimes the only solution.

You're implying that the Saudi government orchestrated 9/11? Osama bin Laden was exiled from Saudi Arabia, living in Afghanistan, and the 19 hijackers (although mostly Saudi citizens) were certainly not sponsored by their government. However, Bush (GW) certainly downplayed their origins... since his interest was in going against Iraq again. And the House of Saud were happy to keep their mouths shut.