A Pentagon general returning to work today after 20 years of retirement would be in for a surprise. Two decades ago his country had just emerged victorious over the international communist order after some 40-odd years of political, cultural, economic and intelligence warfare, which erupted in countless regional conflicts, revolutions and coups in various areas of the globe, and in which his agency had invested all its energies and resources. So he would have set off into his golden years confident that America was safer and more secure now that it had bested what Ronald Reagan had dubbed the "Evil Empire". His confidence would have been fortified by the fact that the last arms appropriations bill that president had submitted to Congress amounted to a half a trillion dollars in today's terms, the effect of which was to lure the shattered Soviet economy into another arms race. Imagine that retired general's surprise, 20 years down the line after his government laid to rest that mortal enemy to freedom and the American way of life, that his president, today, in 2008, has asked Congress to approve a military budget for this era of peace equivalent in actual terms to the size of the 1987 budget, which is to say in the area of $505 billion.
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