Well hang on there, cowboy. We don't disagree about a lot. You're kind of going off on a "war is bad" tangent that I have no fight with. But that wasn't your argument. I was simply responding to this part:

Why do we need a robust military?

That's a very different question than "Why should we USE a robust military" (we shouldn't - when you show your hand you go from being a theoretical nightmare to being a practical army and you lose a lot of deterrent force) or "WHERE should we use a robust military" (Kaplan makes a compelling argument that we'd be in much better geopolitical and economic shape if we attempted to pacify Mexico instead of Iraq/Afghanistan).

I was simply sharing that I'd recently finished a book that made a compelling argument as to why American militarization was good for the globe at large. Nowhere was I implying that a gun is useless unless fired at someone, and nowhere was I suggesting that Iraq and Afghanistan are the places to do it. I will respond to this, though:

why the hell are we wasting so much treasure on an alliance who's members refuse to pull their own weight?

Because geopolitically speaking, the United States benefits from keeping Europe as vassal states. The militaries of Europe are the right size for small-scale pacification, which is a very "UN" thing to do, but wholly undersized for any real threat deterrence. As Kaplan points out, clusterfuck that Iraq was, the US lost 5,000 troops out of a half-million deployed. It was expensive, and wasteful, and polarizing, and will likely lead to a resurgent Iran... but we lost a lot more treasure than blood. You don't accomplish that by sending in the Canadians. Asymmetrical warfare is expensive but successful.

There is robust and there is robust. We are at a point of robustness that looks an awful lot like stupid.

We've been there for going on a century, though. The United States got to dictate a lot of terms in Paris for the simple reason that we were the biggest military left standing. The United States got to reshape Europe as The Marshall Plan because we were the biggest military left standing (did you know that many factions of the military wanted to extend the Marshall Plan to the USSR?). The US did what the US wanted in Korea because we were the biggest military around. And shit - it was argued in Congress during the Vietnam War that the United States could save money by giving every man, woman and child in North Vietnam $67k a year not to fight. Given my 'druthers, I'd go that way as well - we used up 250,000 bullets for every "insurgent" killed in Iraq. So crazy military spending and crazy military involvement is nothing new.