By GREGG EASTERBROOK

 The president of the United States stood in downtown Kiev, cheered by thousands waving
 American flags. Throughout the seas he had traversed, vast American supercarrier battle groups
 roamed the waves at will, while U.S. submarines patrolled the depths and an unseen network of
 acoustic listening posts tracked the world's few remaining unfriendly vessels. In the skies through
 which the president had traveled, American fighters, bombers, and jammers enjoyed uncontested
 supremacy. On land, U.S. troops camped in no fewer than 70 nations. In space, an unparalleled
 satellite network silently watched potential adversaries, vigilant for any exhaust plume or coded
 transmission that might signal trouble. Back home, thousands of tanks, jets, and helicopters sat in
 reserve.

 While the president visited Kiev, American personnel examined Site 49 near Severomorsk, once
 one of Russia's most closely guarded secrets--the home of its navy's nuclear stockpile. America's
 vanquished foes in Moscow had asked the victors to go there to improve security. In return, the
 United States allowed Russian officers into its installations. But the Russians came mainly as
 peddlers offering leftover war hardware. With no chance of actually opposing the U.S. military, they
 figured they might as well become its supplier.

 This is no Tom Clancy fantasy; it describes the conditions surrounding Bill Clinton's visit to Ukraine
 two and a half months ago. The American military is, at this moment, more powerful relative to its
 foes than any armed force in history--stronger than the Roman legions at the peak of the empire,
 stronger than Britannia when the sun never set on the Royal Navy, stronger than the Wehrmacht on
 the day it entered Paris. To be sure, problems exist. The booming economy makes recruitment and
 retention difficult. Weapons procurement is simultaneously wasteful and underfunded. Clinton's
 weak standing with the officer corps has prevented him from even attempting the comprehensive
 Pentagon reorganization the post-cold-war world requires. But the underlying reality remains: The
 United States of the year 2000 is the greatest military power in the history of the world.

 And yet, in this year's presidential campaign, the American Armed Forces are widely described as
 crumbling. George W. Bush, in a much-publicized speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last
 month, bemoaned a "military in decline." At the Republican National Convention, Gulf war hero
 Norman Schwarzkopf derided the Pentagon as enfeebled. The Armed Services are in a "downward
 spiral" (Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott), "neglected" (Senator John McCain), in "bad" shape
 (Representative Curt Weldon), and "could not fight and win against Iraq today" (Representative
 Duncan Hunter). Bush advisers routinely describe the American military as a "hollow force."

 So where does this hollowness reside? In nuclear arms, Russia has about the same number of
 warheads as the United States, but many are unusable. Russia's sea-launched warheads, its most
 valuable kind, are effectively decommissioned because Moscow's strategic submarine fleet is in such
 poor repair that it rarely ventures far from port. (And when it does, well, think Kursk.) By contrast,
 several of America's Ohio-class strategic submarines are at sea at any given moment, and each
 bears enough force to incinerate every major target in Russia and China. Versus America's
 thousands of missile-borne warheads, ready to launch on a few minutes' notice, China possesses 18
 antiquated single-warhead icbms that require hours or days of launch preparation, plus a single
 nuclear-missile submarine that almost never departs its dock slip. America may not have a reliable
 missile defense, something no country has ever had; but, if any country ever does, the United States
 will be the first. Overall, America's strategic deterrent is today stronger relative to the rest of the
 world than it has been at any point since the United States' brief atomic monopoly in the late '40s.

 In air power, America today possesses more jet bombers, more advanced fighter planes and
 tactical aircraft, and more aerial tankers, which allow fighters and bombers to operate far from their
 home soil, than all the other nations of the world combined. In the post-World War II era,
 American aircraft have flown with near impunity throughout the world. Since the early Vietnam war
 years, U.S.-built aircraft have decisively won every air battle in which they have participated.

 On the seas, the U.S. Navy boasts more than twice as many principal combat ships as Russia and
 China combined, plus a dozen supercarrier battle groups, compared with zero for the rest of the
 world. Included in the supercarrier contingent are eight astonishingly large and sophisticated
 Nimitz-class floating cities, crewed by nearly 6,000 people and capable of launching more aircraft
 per minute than Chicago's O'Hare Airport; a ninth, the Ronald Reagan, is being readied for
 christening. (Russia possesses the world's only non-American heavy carrier, the Admiral
 Kuznetsov, but the ship is in such poor condition that it is widely viewed as a fish reef looking for a
 place to sink.) The power and quality of U.S. Burke-class destroyers and the new Virginia-class
 attack submarines are similarly unmatched. The United States rules the blue water without
 opposition. In fact, it possesses the only fleet in the world designed for anything broader than shore
 defense and regional action.

 On the ground, the U.S. Army not only rolls the world's best armor (including nearly 8,000 of the
 fearfully effective Abrams tanks, more than the combined number of modern tanks possessed by
 Russia and China), but, as the Gulf war showed, it has the world's best-trained troops. China has
 more soldiers, but the bulk of them are poorly educated forced conscripts, while America boasts
 the best-educated large military ever. Ninety-nine percent of American troops are high school
 graduates, almost all officers have finished college, and a master's degree or higher is essential for
 promotion at the top. The education and training shows. Iraq actually brought to the Gulf war a
 larger ground force than the United States, yet the army was so thoroughly routed that it sometimes
 appeared that the Iraqis weren't even firing their weapons. Often they weren't: Abrams tanks
 possess such effective long-range cannon and fire control that in most clashes they destroyed Iraq's
 best Russian-built armor while the enemy tanks were a full mile too far away to begin shooting back.

 In amphibious forces, other nations have service branches called "marines," but none possesses
 anything like the U.S. Marines--whole divisions backed by helicopter carriers, "swimming" armor,
 and "jump jets," capable of going ashore anywhere in the world. The United States is the only nation
 that even maintains a standing heavy amphibious force.

 In money, American military spending is three times China's and Russia's combined. America
 spends more on defense than the next twelve highest-spending nations put together. Even adjusting
 for the fact that American soldiers are well-paid while many of the world's are not, the money edge
 is huge: 63 percent of world military spending comes from the United States and its close allies.
 Much of that money pays for an extraordinary logistical infrastructure. During World War II,
 supplies expended per U.S. soldier in the field worked out to 60 pounds per day, including fuel and
 water; by the Gulf war, the figure was up to 400 pounds, all delivered to the right place at the right
 time without snafus. In the six-month buildup to the Gulf war, the United States moved more
 tonnage over a greater distance than in the two-year buildup to Normandy.

 In technology, U.S. "smart" weapons increasingly hit their targets exactly--within a "circular error
 probable" of as little as a meter. Individual U.S. soldiers can receive space-relayed battlefield
 updates, while U.S. electronic jamming and "spoofing" devices have grown so effective that they
 cause false squadrons of aircraft to appear on enemy screens while keeping the real ones
 undetected. The United States has three classes of stealth aircraft already in operation, with three
 more close to production; no other nation, even in the affluent West, even has one on the drawing
 board. Abrams tanks not only fire accurately over long distances but do so while moving; a
 computerized stabilizer system compensates for terrain, bumps, and wind. (By contrast, most of the
 world's tanks must clank to a vulnerable halt to discharge an accurate shot.) And that's just what the
 United States has today. Under development are lasers for shooting down tactical missiles, fighters
 that sustain supersonic speed for hours (instead of minutes, as the best planes do today), mobile
 artillery that fires at an unheard-of rate, remotecontrol fighter-bombers so much smaller than piloted
 planes that they are invisible until within lethal range, electromagnetic rays that fry the circuitry of
 whatever they hit, and even precision-guided weapons that fall from orbit without it being necessary
 for an American aircraft to enter another country's airspace.

 In concept, America is the world's sole military whose primary mission is not defense. Practically
 the entire U.S. military is an expeditionary force, designed not to guard borders--a duty that ties
 down most units of other militaries, including China's--but to "project power" elsewhere in the
 world. America maintains 100,000 soldiers in Europe, 100,000 in the western Pacific, and bases
 and fuel depots across the globe, all aimed at stomping out problems long before an opponent
 glimpses our shores. The Air Force trains pilots to fly from the interior of the United States half a
 world away and back. (The B-2 bombers that participated in the Serbia campaign operated from
 Missouri, flying more than 10,000 miles round-trip for each strike.) The Marines keep supply ships
 "pre-positioned" in ports across the seas so that they will already be in place when the call comes.
 Since World War II, America has fought, and almost always prevailed, in a dozen places thousands
 of miles from home, while only one other nation (Britain, in the Falklands) has even attempted
 distant combat. And America's adversaries have stumbled in conflicts on their own borders (the
 Soviet Union, in Afghanistan; Iraq, in the Gulf war and against Iran; China, in Korea). Even before
 the Soviet Union fell, America's military power was far ahead of the rest of the world's. And this
 relative strength has not declined in the past decade; it has steadily risen.
 

   he devotees of the "hollow military" school do not deny that America's Armed Services have a
   glittering postwar record, but they argue that, during the Clinton years, the forces have suffered
 serious erosion. The claim contains grains of truth but greatly underestimates the continuing
 magnitude of U.S. strength.

 It's true that personnel resources are strained in places. Army and Marine staffing is fine, but the
 Navy is struggling with its personnel requirements--long tours at sea, on vessels where the funds go
 into weaponry rather than creature comforts, have limited appeal in a prosperous economy. The
 booming civilian airline business is hiring every pilot it can find, leaving the Air Force roughly 1,000
 fliers short. Retention rates for experienced personnel have fallen in many categories.

 But the military is already addressing such problems--it increased salaries in each of the last two
 defense-budget cycles. Candidate Bush cites pay as one of the Clinton military's core problems, and
 it is true that most members of today's Armed Forces earn less than their civilian counterparts. But
 for soldiers to be paid less than civilians is hardly new. Comparisons by Cindy Williams, a former
 Congressional Budget Office official, put the gap between comparable wage raises in the civilian
 and military sectors at about 13 percent under Clinton, only slightly higher than the 11.5 percent that
 prevailed under Presidents Reagan and Bush. During his presidential campaign, McCain said things
 were so bad that vast numbers of U.S. service members depended on food stamps. Actually, less
 than one in 200 military families receive food stamps, a lower proportion than among the population
 as a whole. And, for those that do, it's usually because of a quirk by which military personnel who
 receive an off-base housing allowance don't declare that as income, making them appear in worse
 financial shape than they truly are.

 Readiness has indeed fallen in the last few years from its postwar high under President Bush. But as
 Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, has shown, the "mission capable"
 rate for aircraft, tanks, and other key systems now runs from 70 to 80 percent, about the same as
 during the Reagan presidency. Since 1998, when the Joint Chiefs began expressing concerns, the
 Pentagon readiness budget has increased significantly--and will likely rise further, since Clinton's
 fiscal 2001 defense request proposes to add another $4.4 billion.

 Some note with alarm that defense spending has declined almost 40 percent in real-dollar terms
 from its 1986 cold war peak, mirroring the 40 percent drop in active-duty personnel. But no one,
 including at the Pentagon, believes spending needed to stay at the '80s level: the American military
 has always ebbed in the years after a win, and the cold war was emphatically a win. As part of the
 contraction, the Army has decreased from 18 divisions to 10, while Navy and Air Force units have
 declined by around one-third. Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney says this shows
 the Defense Department is atrophying. But the reduction in divisions, combatant ships, and fighter
 wings follows basically the contraction strategy laid out by Cheney himself when he was secretary of
 defense, in a 1990 document called the Base Force review.
 

   or all their fiery rhetoric, Republicans and Democrats today don't fundamentally disagree about
   defense spending, as they did, say, during the Carter and Reagan years. Since Clinton took
 office, his defense-budget proposals have never differed from Republican counterproposals by
 more than 2 percent. For fiscal 2001, for example, Clinton proposed an increase of about 4
 percent; congressional Republicans replied by proposing an increase of slightly less than 6 percent
 of the Pentagon budget. On the campaign trail, George W. Bush has suggested increasing military
 spending by somewhat more than $5 billion per year--incremental, considering the current $310
 billion in total defense-spending authority--while Al Gore says he favors as much as a $12 billion
 annual increase.

 Many of the military's current problems stem not from hollowing out but from bloating. And many of
 the very congressmen who complain about military decline are to blame. For instance, for years the
 Pentagon has requested permission to close additional redundant bases and has been denied; last
 spring the Senate voted to postpone further base-closure decisions until at least 2003.
 Congressional patrons also insist on expensive programs the Pentagon doesn't want. The V-22
 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft--three of whose first 15 models have crashed--has been recommended for
 cancellation by the Pentagon three times, yet it remains in production. The V-22 stays alive largely
 because of Representative Curt Weldon, in whose district it is built. When he's not pressuring the
 White House to divert funds to this patronage boondoggle, Weldon demands to know why there
 isn't more money available for missile defense.
 

   he bloat isn't confined to big-ticket items. Fully two-thirds of the Pentagon budget goes to
   personnel, operations, and maintenance, and most observers think nowhere near enough has
 been done to make routine procurement market-efficient. Only recently, for example, did Pentagon
 quartermasters win the authority to buy minor office supplies without filing formal purchase orders.
 And most basic provisions used by U.S. forces overseas are still shipped from the United States
 rather than purchased "on the economy." Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, president
 of Business Executives for National Security, calculates that if the Pentagon did more of its
 nonmilitary purchasing in standard commercial ways, "outsourced" all work that does not require
 military personnel, and closed unneeded bases, it could save $30 billion annually--effectively
 increasing the money available for real defense by 10 percent.

 Weapons-buying also needs reform. Despite numerous efforts to bring market principles to
 big-ticket acquisitions--including the Packard Commission under Reagan and a similar project
 conducted by Defense Secretary William Cohen--most weapons systems still "take far too long to
 build and cost far too much," in the words of the General Accounting Office. "ARCHAIC BUYING
 BREEDS EXORBITANT ARMS PRICES" was the cheerful headline of a recent Aviation Week and
 Space Technology article about Pentagon weapons projects--and Aviation Week is a Pentagon
 booster!

 The V-22 aircraft, for example, cost $80 million each--double the price of the much larger civilian
 Boeing 737. The F-22 Raptor, the Air Force's latest fighter, costs a breathtaking $200 million,
 more than treble the price of the F-15 Eagle, which it will replace. Retired Air Force Colonel
 Everest Riccioni, a former fighter pilot and fighter-plane designer, has called the cost of the F-22
 "obscene." Bombers too have grown ridiculously expensive, with a single B-2 costing $2.2 billion.
 Prices are so high that the Air Force now plans to delay any new bomber purchases until 2037, at
 which point the last of the service's B-52s will be as old as the World War I vintage biplanes now
 on display at the Smithsonian.

 One reason prices are so high is the sluggish pace at which weapons systems are built. The average
 development cycle for a weapons program is now eleven years--twice the time it took Boeing to
 develop the technologically complex 777, and so long that the typical project usually spans the
 tenure of two or three presidents, several secretaries of defense, numerous sets of Joint Chiefs, and
 half a dozen program managers. Such long production cycles mean tremendous time and energy
 wasted on wheel-spinning and covering old ground.

 Take the F-22. Prototypes were airborne, and flying impressively, in 1991. So did the aircraft go
 into production? No, it suffered through a full decade of "engineering development," Pentagonese
 for periods in which the main action is lobbying and budget increases. In the case of the F-22,
 "engineering development" served mainly to increase the plane's cost and weight: no important
 features or design elements were changed. According to the current timetable, the F-22 will not
 actually enter service until 2005, which will be 14 years after the first models left the runway--the
 B-24 Liberator, workhorse of the Air Corps in World War II, went from prototype to thousands in
 global combat to all units mothballed in half that time. There's no doubt the F-22 will be the best
 fighter ever, but glacial development has rendered the plane so overpriced that even the world's
 richest country may not be able to afford it--the planned buy has steadily declined, from 648
 originally to 341 today.

 Retired Air Force Colonel John Warden, chief planner for the Gulf air war, believes
 counterintuitively that the solution to cost overruns is lots of small projects. "When you've got a
 program designed to last for decades and buy hundreds of airplanes, this gives contractors a
 tremendous stake in running up the price," Warden says. "Everyone in the [Pentagon] becomes
 incredibly conservative, because they don't want to be blamed for killing a huge program. There are
 endless review boards and extra bureaucracy, while the designers realize this may be the only
 airplane they field in their entire careers, so they gold plate it with everything." Warden notes that the
 F-117 stealth fighter was conceived in 1978 and operational by 1983, at a cost that, converted to
 current dollars, equals nearly one-third of the F-22 price. "The reason the F-117 was built cheaply
 and quickly is that it was a small-batch program of about 50 planes; no one's career would have
 been ruined or no contractor bankrupted if the thing failed," Warden says. "The F-22 program is
 too big to fail, and that leads to bloat."
 

     arden thinks that if the military fielded small numbers of new fighters every few years rather
     than one mega-project per decade, as it currently does, total costs would fall, and the planes
 themselves would improve, because each successive generation could express the latest twists in
 technology. Given that the F-22's basic concept was developed in 1986, by the time the plane
 finally goes out to the flight line, this "new" fighter will be based on technological assumptions that
 are 20 years old. "If you were designing the F-22 today, there's no way it would look the way it
 does--we know so much more about electronics and stealth aerodynamics now," Warden says.
 Already, the Air Force has allocated a multimillion-dollar fund to stockpile parts for the F-22,
 because, though the plane is not yet operational, many of its components are becoming obsolete.

 Overpricing is especially important because in the next few years the military needs to buy a lot of
 new weapons. The '90s, defense analysts say, were a "procurement holiday," because the Reagan
 buildup supplied so many tanks, ships, and airplanes that Bush and Clinton didn't need to fund
 many. If the U.S. military is to remain unchallenged, that holiday must end. The Army needs more
 battlefield rockets, a new advanced rapid-fire howitzer, and new light armor for the rapid-reaction
 divisions it is assembling for Kosovo-style missions. The Navy's Virginia-class submarines will
 ensure years of U.S. mastery of the oceans, but only if they're funded and hit with champagne
 bottles. The Navy has also contemplated a type of new vessel, an "arsenal ship" designed to launch
 cruise missiles by the hundreds, making future Serbia-scale operations more decisive while lowering
 the risk to pilots and civilians. (No one is saying so, but an arsenal ship might also be ideal for a
 future U.S. defense of Israel.) The two Clinton terms included only one major aircraft-acquisition
 program. Now five are "spooling up" simultaneously--the F-22, the V-22, a new version of the
 F-18 carrier-based fighter, the Army's Comanche combat helicopter, and the Joint Strike Fighter, a
 stealth plane especially needed by the Marines, whose air wings are growing obsolete.

 The new fighters alone could run $350 billion, or more than a year's total Pentagon spending. Throw
 in some funding for an anti-missile system, and you can see why the Joint Chiefs think the defense
 budget needs to rise by as much as $30 billion annually. Defense Secretary Cohen has said the next
 generation of weapons is "going to cost more money, and we ought to face up to it." But ending the
 procurement holiday does not necessarily require a larger budget. McInerney estimates the military
 could save all the money it needs for new weapons by reforming its purchasing. Those who claim
 the military needs to be more expensive to keep from being hollow are missing the point. What the
 Armed Forces need is to be as smart in their purchasing as they are in battle.
 

   rucial to that effort is for the military finally to adapt to the post-cold-war world. The Pentagon
   has been refreshingly forthright about the passing of "the threat," as the Soviet Union was known
 to the services: there's no cold war nostalgia among generals and admirals. But, though the Pentagon
 has let go of the cold war as a mission, it clings with incredible determination to the organizational
 hierarchy that mission dictated--in particular, a force structure designed for a heavy armored
 confrontation in Central Europe coupled with an all-out naval assault on Russian home territory
 through the Norwegian Sea. Since the Berlin Wall fell, no fewer than seven national commissions or
 major Pentagon internal panels have recommended extensive changes in military organization and
 combat structure. (George W. says that, if elected, he'd institute an eighth.) Yet each has gone
 unheeded.

 Why, for example, does the post-cold-war Navy need a dozen carrier battle groups when today's
 world offers no other powerful navy to fight? Why does the Air Force refuse to give up its "roles
 and missions" budget control over close air support (the planes that aid troops in battle) when it
 shows no enthusiasm for this job? (The Air Force prefers "deep strike" missions behind enemy
 lines.) Why has the Army continued to emphasize heavy armor designed to destroy other armor
 when fast deployment of light forces is what it is increasingly asked to do? Why do the Marines
 have their own private air division, except for fear that the other services won't come to their aid?
 Perhaps most fundamentally, why does the Pentagon cling to its "two war" planning structure--the
 idea that America must always be ready to fight two pitched conflicts simultaneously? In coming
 decades, the two-war scenario seems much less likely than "half a war, three peacekeeping
 missions, and one annoying low-intensity we-don't-know-what-to-call-it." Which would require a
 different allocation of resources.

 Pentagon reform is stymied by interservice rivalry. The Army insists on its own close air support
 units, because Army leadership does not trust the Air Force to send planes to support troops at the
 center of a battle. That insistence both wastes money and potentially costs lives, since what the
 Army has for this purpose is the Apache anti-tank helicopter, the one U.S. weapon that didn't work
 in the Serbia campaign. A cold-war-era Pentagon agreement says that while the Air Force,
 Marines, and Navy can have planes and helicopters, the Army can have only helicopters. This
 forces the Army to field the woeful Apache, because, according to the Pentagon's outmoded
 organizational chart, the Army's alternative is nothing.
 

   ollowing the interservice follies of the 1983 Grenada operation--during which an Army squad
   pinned down on the island famously had to call the United States on an AT&T calling card at a
 pay phone to convey a "send help" message to Navy ships offshore--Congress passed
 Goldwater-Nichols, a bill that officially "unified" the services. The legislation helped, making it
 possible to have a single-theater commander, Schwarzkopf, during the Gulf war. Most significantly,
 Schwarzkopf employed his Goldwater-Nichols authority to bar the Marines from staging an
 amphibious landing at Kuwait City. Schwarzkopf felt it would be a needless risk, and he turned out
 to be right. Marine leadership had been eager for the landing, and, before Goldwater-Nichols,
 Schwarzkopf would not have been able to stop it, because even four-star Army commanders could
 not issue orders to officers in Marine uniform, or vice versa. But, while Goldwater-Nichols allowed
 for temporary "joint task forces" to execute specific campaigns, larger, structural interservice
 disputes were left standing. When the Gulf war withdrawal began, the unified command disbanded.

 And so turf fights continue to impede post-cold-war restructuring. In a cogent new book, Lifting
 the Fog of War, retired Admiral Bill Owens notes that because individual services propose
 weapons projects, each tends to build its own empire rather than address military needs generally.
 Thus the Navy keeps proposing more money for carrier battle groups while putting the more
 cost-effective arsenal ship on the back burner, because it could make carriers seem outdated,
 imperiling the Navy's budget share. The flyboys lobby hard for the F-22--a max-tech aircraft
 designed for the deep-strike missions that are the Air Force's glory--and give lip service to the Joint
 Strike Fighter, a less glamorous plane whose purpose would be close support of Army and Marine
 grunts. Owens thinks the Joint Chiefs, not individual services, should propose new weapons
 systems, which would put greater emphasis on overall requirements and less on budget jockeying.
 Owens also favors true unification of the services, eliminating their separation on any matters more
 serious than the Army-Navy football game.
 

     hat might a revamped post-cold-war American military look like? Owens believes the Armed
     Forces could safely continue to reduce overall personnel, as the Army begins to realize the
 kind of technology-based productivity improvements that have already come to the Navy and Air
 Force. Role-and-mission traditions could be scrambled if a unified Joint Chiefs adopted a "whatever
 works" approach to conflicted issues like close air support. As the cost of technology falls, smart
 bombs, which even today constitute only a small share of U.S. munitions--just 9 percent of the
 bombs used in the Gulf war were precision-guided--might entirely replace "dumb" bombs, rendering
 U.S. bombardment more fearsome to adversaries, less dangerous to innocents, and cheaper. (The
 new JDAM smart bomb costs about one-tenth as much as the bombs it replaces.) Flocks of
 relatively small, remote-piloted "unmanned combat air vehicles" might dominate future operations,
 while remote-operated minitanks assail enemy armor without risk to a single American soldier's life.

 Perhaps cumbersome procurement rules might even be loosened so that new-economy technology
 entrepreneurs, and not just the aerospace old boys' network, could contribute ideas to national
 defense. "Consolidation has made the existing [aerospace] firms too large and not agile," Warden,
 the retired colonel, says. "If we brought true U.S. private initiative to defense, we'd be thinking up
 clever new technological ideas much faster than adversaries could devise countermeasures." Real
 defense reform of the kind Warden suggests could make the U.S. Armed Forces even stronger,
 while generating budget cuts that offset the expense of new weapons. If the Pentagon does one day
 "hollow out," it is less likely to be because America's leaders haven't given the military sufficient
 money than because they haven't given military affairs sufficient thought.

 The British military writer James Adams, who's being read around the Pentagon these days, recently
 wrote, "Peacekeeping and warfare today are taking place in a world the likes of which we have
 never seen." Actually, we have seen it--when Rome was the only superpower, and it spent three
 centuries imposing order and, mainly, enforcing peace. For a time, all nations combined could not
 have defeated Rome in the field. Whatever it may portend for world security, today America is
 more powerful than Rome was during the Pax. How strange that so many American politicians
 won't admit it.

 Recently:

 Gregg Easterbrook found that while critics of the death penalty think DNA testing could alter the debate,
 they'll be surprised to learn how right they are. Also, he recently wrote that while enforcement is down,
 pollution is too.

 Currently (09.11.00 Issue):
 The Editors: Why Gore's wrong and Lieberman's right on vouchers.
 TRB: Jodie Allen on why America can't build anything.
 So Near and Yet...: Stanley Kauffmann finds that both Steal this Movie and Aimée and Jaguar are saved
 by their actors.
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