America is the most powerful nation EVER!!!

Stealth drones, GPS-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; anti-tank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle - the US military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its conquest of Iraq.

The American military is the strongest the world has known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. The extent of American military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate. The US sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A 10th Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses so much as one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.

Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American supercarrier. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.

Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of The Hunt for Red October made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the US.



For years to come, no other nation is likely to rival American might. Which means the global arms race is over, with the US the undisputed heavyweight champion.

Gregg Easterbrook notes the overwhelming superiority of US military hardware, while Christian Lowe notes the overwhelming superiority of US military command and control.

One consequence of this overwhelming US superiority in conventional warfare is that other countries seem to have stopped competing:


The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That’s a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.