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The US is THE target of terrorists.
I think Israel might disagree with you on that point.
Sorry to be imprecise on that, but I did write that "next to Israel" in a previous post and was too lazy to write it again.
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Some have recommended covert operations. Those are completely useless against state sponsors of terrorism. In Iran alone there are potentially dozens of nuclear enrichment facilities close to being able to produce weapons grade fuel.
Actually, Mossad has a pretty good history in that department...
Yeah, you're right! They've been so successful that they've stopped all terrorist strikes against them! Oh wait...
On the other side of things... If we're going to be there, then let's take a look at how we're spending all that money. For the cost of one fighter jet, we could have bought body armor for everyone. (Something like that, anyway. I'm not going to run through the exact numbers.) Body armor shouldn't have been too expensive to provide, especially if we could have slashed some of the wastage. And then there's the whole issue of hiring expensive mercs instead of doing better by our own troops. And the lack of armored vehicles. And the whole situation with health care. And the programs for vets... In short, if you're going to go to war, support the troops!
Getting back to the armored vehicles and body armor, I mentioned earlier that it was essentially a supply problem. When asked about it, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it this way, "You go to war with what you've got, not what you think you'd like to have," essentially saying that the war couldn't be postponed long enough to get enough equipment. As it is, it took two years to fully outfit our troops and then make ongoing adjustments to the changing tactics of the enemy.
Case in point, just look at the Pacific Theater in World War II. After WWI, America had essentially disarmed itself and wasn't ready to go to war against anyone, but circumstances dictated that we didn't have the luxury of time. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the US was left without a single operational battleship, all eight of them having been crippled or sunk in the harbor. Fortunately for us, Halsey's carrier battlegroup composed of the Enterprise and Hornet had been delayed by a day getting into port by a storm. Up until that point, naval wars had always been fought ship to ship with battleships slugging it out. Without a single battleship, we were forced to change tactics to the almost exclusive use of the carrier airwings. For the first time, naval battles were fought without a ship having sighted the enemy ships.
Even with the change in strategy, we went into the Pacific war with only five carriers: the Enterprise, Hornet, Lexington, Yorktown, and Saratoga, against the cream of the Japanese Navy. We eventually brought the Wasp over from the Atlantic theater. Over the course of 1942, we lost the Lexington at Coral Sea, the Yorktown at Midway, the Hornet and Wasp in the Solomons. The Saratoga was crippled but not sunk by a torpedo, and the Enterprise had its forward elevator knocked out of alignment by a bomb. So at the end of 1942, only the half-crippled Enterprise stood between Japan and California. By 1943, industrial production began putting out a navy that could formidably take on Japan with the addition of the Essex class carriers. We eventually finished the war with over 70 heavy carriers and countless light carriers and escort carriers while attrition left the Japanese with none.
Admiral Yamamoto had pressured his government in 1941 not to attack the US, lest they "wake a sleeping giant." He warned them that if the US could not be defeated in the first year, the industrial might of the United States would eventually be more than Japan could withstand. Tojo rejected his recommendation, believing the Americans to be soft and weak, a paper tiger. Yamamoto was right, but he never lived to see it. In late 1942, US code breakers intercepted his itinerary and US fighters met and shot down his plane over Bougainville.
As another instance of history repeating itself, al Qaeda woke the sleeping giant in 2001 and was surprised at the ferocity of the response, believing the response would only be another cruise missile in the desert.
