PUSHING THE FIZZLING MISSILE BUTTON

Fighting wars in distant lands has become clinical and, in many respects, sanitized. Push a button on a ship or airplane, and a missile with the built-in intelligence of a rocket scientist's computer does the dirty work, heading for targets hundreds of miles away.

Unfortunately, U.S. supplies of cruise missiles are woefully short. Pentagon budgets have been cut so much in recent years that there aren't even any factories making the missiles.

Which means there is another piece to the Clinton war-machine puzzle that doesn't quite seem to fit.