History and were doomed to repeat it

[Anomalocaris]

Que the second sacking of the white house by Canada? 
War of 1812 v2?

That's a great example of what happens when government tries to save money on the military.

The reason why saving money hurt the military is because the military was intellectually mediocre to start with, and can think of no way to improve its fighting power than to stupidly do more of what it has always done in a mediocre. Anger.

If the military really consisted of elite, problem solving men operating in a framework that encourage independent professionalism, Forcing the military to be smaller and restrict its access to excessive funding in times of no existential threat usually encourage the military to become even more forward looking, clear thinking, and sharply focus on maximizing its own cost effectiveness, and thus makes it more effective when the world actually moves towards truly unavoidable crisis.

A good example is the interwar German army that was forced to remain at a tiny fraction of the sizes of its potential adversaries.