[AndyJackson]

overly expensive new headquarters for the bureaucracy called NATO

Even towards the end of the cold war, that is all that NATO had become. It's about all that most standing militaries become when you don't have a real large scale war against a peer to clear out the dead wood and take your country and economy down to basic essentials, like WWI for Europe and WWII for all of us.

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

Yours is an interesting comment. One watches the “resolve” of non-US NATO militaries actually avoiding joining the fray of late. Mercenaries, European and American, are being killed in fighting, as another news thread recently reports.

We knew a colonel in the US Army who was NATO-assigned, who saw "dead wood" firsthand. Sadly he is passed now, as time's clock ticks for all us old guys. But his 'witness' was that what you called "dead wood" was piling up in the NATO bureaucracy. What is certain, as is true for all bureaucracies, is that they have a will to survive for sinecures are sinecures. Here and there, the game's the same.