At the time, the U.S. Warfare State’s budget— counting the pentagon, spy agencies, DOE weapons, foreign aid, homeland security and veterans—-was about $500 billion in today’s dollars.  Now, a quarter century on from the Cold War’s end, that same metric stands at $900 billion.

This near doubling of the Warfare State’s fiscal girth is a tad incongruous.  After all, America’s war machine was designed to thwart a giant, nuclear-armed industrial state, but, alas, we now have no industrial state enemies left on the planet.

The much-shrunken Russian successor to the Soviet Union, for example, has become a kleptocracy run by a clever thief who prefers stealing from his own citizens rather than his neighbors.