With "stay home" plan, the only thing "decisive and ovewhelming" is going to be the enemy's strike., when it's too late.
Today politics are global, requiring constant control and supervision. From East Chinese Sea, to the Baltic Sea, each side is constantly probing the boundaries. Once a weakness in the global enforcement is spotted, another Crimea or Burma or North Korea or Syria flares up.
Global military policy fights fires at the source, when still small, not waiting for the fire to become an inferno, letting itself in into backyard without knocking.
The problem is the manner in which we (the US) have chosen to fight those fires. Attack two nations, at once, without sufficient troops for such action, without a solid plan for how to remove ourselves, killing and dislocating millions of civilians. Followed by attacks on civilian populations while attempting to target specific individuals or small groups, resulting in casualties like wedding parties.
Those fires have become an inferno for the western world in ISIS (recently) and Al Qaeda (the last 20-30 years) precisely because of the way that a large portion of the world's population has been disenfranchised and discarded by the West.
The comment that you commented on didn't say that we should stay home from all wars; he/she said that the government should be decisive about when and where to attack. The final sentence, that we should just stay home, was referring to the wars which the United States chose poorly to become involved in, and which have been drawn out beyond a "decisive and overwhelming" attack.
Global military policy fights fires at the source, when still small, not waiting for the fire to become an inferno, letting itself in into backyard without knocking.
I don't advocate the nonsense that we should all stay at home and do nothing. That's not my position.
But if the American people are unwilling to live with the idea of servicemen dying in some foreign war in the East China Sea or the Baltic, maybe we should take a good look at ourselves and decide how much agony we should endure.
I think the "stay home" comment was more about not actively deploying forces. Home can just as easily be forward deployed base. There's a huge difference between what American forces in Korea and Japan are doing than the forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, South Yemen, and the rest of the Greater Middle East.
Today politics are global, requiring constant control and supervision. From East Chinese Sea, to the Baltic Sea, each side is constantly probing the boundaries. Once a weakness in the global enforcement is spotted, another Crimea or Burma or North Korea or Syria flares up.
Global military policy fights fires at the source, when still small, not waiting for the fire to become an inferno, letting itself in into backyard without knocking.