Remember back in the Republican primaries when Ron Paul told the Amerikan people that spending $1 trillion a year maintaining an empire around would bankrupt us. He said this was the strategy that the mujaheddin had used against the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan back in the early 1980’s. Remember how McCain, Guiliani, and Romney openly laughed at Dr. Paul. Well here is a report that says combat operations overseas will cost about $860 billion over the the next ten years which means it will probably be twice that:

Ongoing combat operations overseas could cost the United States more than $860 billion over the next 10 years, further ballooning the defense budget, experts told Congress on Wednesday.
That total includes plans to dramatically draw down the number of troops in Iraq in the next few years, according to officials from the Congressional Budget Office.

Even with reducing the number of deployed combat troops to 75,000 worldwide, the CBO estimates that the Defense Department faces recurring personnel costs of at least $69 billion a year, coupled with other equipment repair costs.

Lawmakers on the House Budget Committee said those estimates will only increase the pressure on budget planners to make difficult choices in how to properly fund the department.

We are broke and yet our leaders, with the consent of the people and cheered on by their sychophants in the press are attempting to defeat an adversary on his own turf who in their history have never been defeated whether it was Alexander the Great, the British Empire, or the Soviet Union. None of which was encumbered by a free press reporting every bombing raid on a goatherder or had any compunction in wiping out entire villages. So how exactly are we going to win? How much is it going to cost? How many more of our people will die? What is victory and how do we get out?

They say when a bubble is at the top or a market is at a bottom you can recognize it with a magazine cover that shows the highwater mark. The press always seems to catch on to a trend right at the top or bottom like when oil was at $10/bbl and the "Economist" magazine had a cover that said the world was awash in oil right before it went to $30/bbl and onward to a high of $147 in July 08. I think the magazine cover for empire is the commissioning of the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. Here we are trillions in debt with a collapsing economy and troops in around 100 countries and we are building billion dollar aircraft carriers to do what, bomb more brown people around the world. I think the US economy and the US empire have both jumped the shark. Notice the Orwellian motto of the ship "Freedom at Work". Hopefully, when the dollar finally collapses from all of this nonsense the sailors do not reenact scenes from "The Battleship Potemkin". Unfortunately when empires collapse it is usually pretty chaotic for the people living inside the boundaries of the empire. We had our chance as Dr. Paul warned us but we laughed him off the stage. Now sit back and watch how he was right about foreign policy, the economy, the dollar, and how the Republicans would lose power because they did not have a coherent message.