Sure, I bet Afghanis sit around at night reminiscing of the good old days under the taliban...

However this is completely irrelevant to the point. The question was why do we need to have a superior military to our adversaries, and the answer is because our adversaries are real, and if we care about our liberty we need to take them seriously. To say otherwise is either laughably naive, or is an outright rejection of liberty. Try refusing to work on military contracts in Russia or China and see what that gets you. In China, your career pretty much has a hard ceiling unless you want to join the communist party.