As usual, another excellent piece by Victor Davis Hanson over at National Review Online regarding the unmatched power of the U.S. military and how it has evolved and will continue to evolve. The last 3 paragraphs are the meat of it:

"The United States military is now evolving geometrically as it gains experience from near-constant fighting and grafts new technology daily. Indeed, it seems to be doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling its lethality every few years. And the result is that we are outdistancing not merely the capabilities of our enemies but our allies as well — many of whom who have not fought in decades — at such a dizzying pace that our sheer destructive power makes it hard to work with others in joint operations. In that context, we might reassess the need to take technology to its theoretical -nth degree: How many new sophisticated stealthy $1.5 billion bombers do we need, when the equivalent expenditure would pay for a more mundane but vital mechanized Division for an entire year?

Such unprecedented military power brings with it enormous moral responsibility as the world — its utopians especially — in the decades ahead will vie for a hand in the decisions on how to use it and for what purposes. There quite literally has never been a single nation that has exercised such colossal military force to change almost instantly the status quo, and used it under the auspices of a consensual government to free — Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq — rather than to enslave peoples. How long it will last, we do not know, but we should at least realize that we are living in one of the most anomalous periods in recorded history.

Sophocles would warn us that hubris — not enemies in the here and now — is the only real danger to us on the horizon. But so far we have avoided the gods' nemeses precisely because our soldiers have put their power in the service of good by toppling odious despots — Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein — and leaving the seeds of freedom in their wake. We of an often cynical and ironic society at the least owe them a commensurate idealism."