In return, the United States allowed Russian officers into its installations. But the Russians came mainly as peddlers offering leftover war hardware. With no chance of actually opposing the U.S. military, they figured they might as well become its supplier. To be sure, problems exist. The booming economy makes recruitment and retention difficult.
Weapons procurement is simultaneously wasteful and underfunded.
And yet, in this year's presidential campaign, the American Armed Forces are widely described as crumbling. At the Republican National Convention, Gulf war hero Norman Schwarzkopf derided the Pentagon as enfeebled . In nuclear arms , Russia has about the same number of warheads as the United States, but many are unusable. Russia's sea-launched warheads, its most valuable kind, are effectively decommissioned because Moscow's strategic submarine fleet is in such poor repair that it rarely ventures far from port. By contrast, several of America's Ohio -class strategic submarines are at sea at any given moment, and each bears enough force to incinerate every major target in Russia and China.