[Alberta's Child]

Maintaining the industrial capacity to build hundreds of ships and thousands of military aircraft makes might have made sense in the 1960s -- and surely made sense in the 1940s. But it is a meaningless exercise in an age of space travel and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The United States of America is an empire now, and we don't need to worry very much about foreign military forces. We will eventually collapse the way all empires do: first, by inviting foreign invaders to walk right across our borders ... then, by collapsing from within.

[Pelham]

“The United States of America is an empire now,”

An empire with the trade profile of a third world colony whose main product is raw materials. A far cry from the industrial powerhouse that could convert its thousands of manufacturing plants to war production when it was needed.