However bad you think America is, every other super power is much worse. A few years ago Russia literally conquered a neighboring country just because they wanted to. The engineers who object to these programs are very lucky to live in a country that guarantees them the liberty to do so, but at the end of the day that liberty is protected by the US military.

> but at the end of the day that liberty is protected by the US military.

I think the citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. are quite happy that their liberty is protected. :-(

Sure, I bet Afghanis sit around at night reminiscing of the good old days under the taliban...

However this is completely irrelevant to the point. The question was why do we need to have a superior military to our adversaries, and the answer is because our adversaries are real, and if we care about our liberty we need to take them seriously. To say otherwise is either laughably naive, or is an outright rejection of liberty. Try refusing to work on military contracts in Russia or China and see what that gets you. In China, your career pretty much has a hard ceiling unless you want to join the communist party.

> Sure, I bet Afghanis sit around at night reminiscing of the good old days under the taliban...

Who were strongly financially supported (and thus in some sense "enthroned") by the CIA:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taliban&oldid=846...

"A while later, the U.S. CIA and Saudi Arabic General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funneled funding and equipment through the PakistanI Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen."

Which again is completely irrelevant to the point I’m making.

You're leaving out why they were given money: to fight back against a Communist coup supported by the Soviet Union.

So? The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight a few years later. The (negative) dividends of US militarization are still being paid.

You’re also leaving out the part where the Taliban didn’t exist during the time that Afghani forces were receiving US support. If you look at the reason for getting involved in the first place, most people would agree that it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. That said if you look at how they handled the aftermath, most people would agree that part was a fuck up.

Because it's an important part of the context and explains why the US funded the Taliban.

China and Russia won’t stop just because America does. It’s best to keep all forces balanced, akin to the nuclear deterrence theory.