Do you think we ' ll never need a strong military ? At least not for the foreseeable future . We don ' t face any threat that would require us to have large numbers of ground troops , and we ' ve also got the nuclear arsenal at our disposal . Additionally , until the Cold War the U . S . generally maintained a small standing army composed of a small number of enlisted men and a stable officer corps . We only raised big armies when we actually needed to do so . I don ' t see why we couldn ' t use that same model today . Geopolitical conditions can change . This is true , but they don ' t change on a dime . We ' re in a very favorable geopolitical situation . In fact , it ' s so favorable that it ' s hard to overstate how good we ' ve got it . We have weak neighbors to our north and south . We have two gigantic moats to our east and west . In the areas where potential great power rivals have traditionally arisen Europe and Asia we can pass the buck of incurring the costs in blood and treasure of balancing against potential great power rivals by putting the onus on local nations to defend themselves . Japan and India among others are much more interested in containing China than we are . I don ' t need my health insurance until I get sick , then it ' s pretty important . War isn ' t quite like health insurance because health insurance at least for young , healthy folks is basically there for catastrophic and unforeseeable events . Geopolitics is much more predictable , as long as you ' re a realist . The future is never totally certain , rarely do you get hit by a bus or struck by lightening . There is also a distinction between have the largest military and having the best trained and equipped . At the level of individual personnel ? Sure . But I don ' t see why we need to be spending scores and scores of money on new weapons systems . That money could go towards helping folks at home . Additionally , there ' s a problem of temptation when you have a large standing army when you ' re in the geopolitical situation the US is in . There ' s often a temptation to use it , even when it ' s not in your interest to do so . How likely is it that we would have intervened unilaterally in Iraq , causing the myriad problems which resulted from that invasion , if we didn ' t have a sledgehammer waiting for us to crush the ant ?