The American national security system is broken. Forged in the aftermath of World War II, the national security state was invented to prevent the kind of problems the United States suffered in the fight against Germany, Italy, and Japan, when it had to build a large military and intelligence complex essentially from scratch. Since the heady days of the Cold War, the country's leadership has long assumed that “bigger is always better.”
Today, the defense budget is around $700 billion per year (which is larger than the next 10 countries combined—including China and Russia) and the intelligence community comprises 17 different agencies with over 800,000 employees (with an overall estimated 4 million people holding security clearances throughout the government).
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