CC: I give you the opportunity to digress from the thread even further.
You only mention the capitalist ventures of choice, but what about the non capitalist ventures of choice ?
There are many examples but just take two, the Soviet suppression of Hungarian revolution in 1956 and their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Neither were conflicts of national survival or self defence.
While it is probably true that the Soviet armed forces of that era never suffered from overstretch, it could be argued that as a system for exploitation of the workers, communism was the winner by a large margin.