ARTICLE: Defense budget portends difficult trade-offs, By Katherine McIntire Peters, Government Executive, August 12, 2009

Analysis here supports a favorite logic of mine: if you do not widen your pool of potential allies, and try to make all your SysAdmin efforts on your own, it will end up killing your Leviathan in terms of budget stress.

Of course, making new friends will rob the Leviathan of its favored conflict scenarios, so the Leviathan is screwed by either route and survives primarily by getting America to retreat from the world.

(Thanks: VacationLaneGrp)