Our waning and wanton superpower wields the world's most expensive military, with the most expensive armaments. Washington, DC's privilege, emerging technology, and newly assumed mantle of global mightiness fused like a bad weld in the 1947 National Security Act, producing a unleashable CIA and an unbounded and unhinged Department of Defense.

It is right and proper that this permanent military bureaucracy be known as the Department of War. Everyone on the planet recognizes that it has not conducted defense one single day since its formation.

We'll remember the Department of Defense for many reasons, most iconic perhaps the tracking of a willowy Chinese weather balloon from its long dramatic drift eastward, with a final "safe" shoot-down by an F-22 with a Sidewinder missile in February 2023.  It fell six miles off the South Carolina coast in 47 feet of water. Triumphal reports stated "No one was hurt."

Trump's sense of the Pentagon is typical of his predecessors. US presidents enjoy and relish the ability to murder, maim and destroy by their command, anytime, anywhere. Future generations will categorize the greatest democracies and self-proclaimed republics with tyrants and kings, based on the incredible ease with which unpopular and average men could and would attack whole populations and governments, foreign and domestic.

There is no law, but the king's law; L'etat, c'est moi." Lord Acton, in an 1887 letter to the Archbishop of the Church of England, protested Mr. Creighton's going easy on the crimes of England's political leadership.  We all know this part: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  But Acton continues:  "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."