Stanley Kurtz writes that: "We have been shown in no uncertain terms that our military is far too small to handle the demands of the war on terror."
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to write a sentence saying: "The U.S. spends more on its military establishment than the next N highest-spending nations." Of course, I needed to find a value for N.
I went to the CIA factbook, always a good stop for this sort of thing. Sure enough, they have a neat table of nations ranked by military expenditure. Starting with number two on the table, I worked my way down, intending to just keep adding up the numbers until the total surpassed the U.S. figure. From that I could deduce N.
After about twenty additions, I gave up. The sentence never got written.
Regarding the value of n, it is either 43 or 44, reader opinion is divided.
