The Pentagon's facelift, meanwhile, has less to do with vanity than a last-ditch effort to stave off the deterioration associated with the breakneck construction schedule and shoddy practices of the original architects and builders during World War II. The gentrified Pentagon will also have a massive new addition (thereby throwing off the geometry). This new annex will be a receiving center for incoming packages and deliveries, equipped with state of the art sensors designed to detect even minute traces of chemical and biological weapons or nuclear material.

In an important sense, the new addition is a kind of structural recognition that security challenges on the horizon are just as likely to be at home as abroad, and that the U.S. defense establishment must reorient its exclusively external focus toward domestic threats as well. The battleship-gray behemoth, nicknamed the five-sided puzzle palace by its occupants, has even been designated a national historical building, worthy of preservation for history's sake. It is almost impossible to recall now, but there was some speculation in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War that the military would be able to vacate the Pentagon for a much smaller headquarters, given that the missions and money would be drying up. Even as late as 1994, during his heyday as Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich talked about "turning the Pentagon into a triangle" in an attempt to streamline the military behemoth.

Each of these constructions is the result of a peculiar set of national policies associated with the role of the military inside societies and beyond national boundaries. Yet, taken together, they provide telling clues about the re-emergence of long-dormant militaries on the world stage (in Japan and Germany), the rise to prominence of a new national power on the international scene (China), the plight of a once great military (Russia), and the reorientation of another great power toward a new set of military challenges in the new millennium (the United States). Nothing like a new or refurbished building to remind people that you're back, you've changed, or you've never left.