Re: How many is too many?
That and threat landscapes shift all the time, suddenly an excess can become insufficient.
Do they now? Like the surprise Islamic extremist threat that magically appeared on 9 September? Because it wasn't obvious that arming, grooming and encouraging a bunch of twig-beard nutters to fight the Russians through the 1980s might backfire?
Or the possibility that Russia might retrench to a centralised, nationalist and militarist agenda after their economy imploded in 1998?
All of the threats our military might have to be justified against date back multiple decades. The only sudden shift aspects are either idiot Western politicians either cutting their own defence forces too quickly too fast (Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron), or idiot western politicians pouring fuel on existing foreign conflagrations (Reagan, Bushx2, Obama, Blair, Cameron).