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> In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.

I think this claim requires support. Yes, military spending is high and has bipartisan support, but I don't particularly agree that it is a hallmark of highly capable administration. Funding does not equal capacity.

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The US military supplies and operates bases all over the world, manages huge R&D and equipment pipelines, directly employs more people in the US than Walmart or Amazon, and is capable of incredible organizational and logistics feats like evacuating Afghanistan in a week and dumping an army’s worth of equipment into Ukraine in a month. The administrative capacity of the US military is very high, to the point that organizational and administrative issues are rarely a limiting factor in conducting operations.

Uhhhh... being able to conduct two wars on the other side of the planet for decades and then having people so ignorant of the costs and complexity that they think it's not clearly a miracle of state capacity? That's obscene state capacity.

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