The US is surrounded by two friendly nations and two big fuckoff oceans.

I question the need for 'defense'.

Uhh, Pearl Harbor ?

A different era. Japan is not attacking the US ( or anyone else for that matter ).

9/11, Boston, Orlando, San Bernardino, nah we don't need defense, nobody can get to us.

If I have a magic rock that keeps tigers away, and then tigers arrive despite the rock, would you keep paying for the rock?

As terrible as each of those things were, his point largely stands. Most things labeled 'terrorism' are better handled by police/. Obviously the stupidly large mountain of money the US gov spends on 'defense' didn't save people from those. A country's defense budget is really for defending itself from invasion, and our risk of that is low. The last meaningful example anyone can give is pearl harbor - which was 80 years ago in a pre nuclear world.

He didn't say we didn't need police.

Oh yeah, spray the fire extinguisher at the top of the fire instead of the base, that'll surely put it out!

No, just stop "extinguishing" the fire by burning other peoples' houses down.

(It's as absurd as it sounds, and yet that's essentially the US strategy for defending from terrorist attacks)

Granted, this is basically how wildfires are extinguished, though more trees/brush than houses.

True, but the context was about household fires :).

To be completely literal-minded for a second, what you're describing is called a "firebreak" and is a standard part of the firefighting arsenal.

You can stretch any analogy past its breaking point. The discussion was about household fires.

Random applications of overwhelming force too have situations in which they're appropriate. Fighting terrorism is not one of them.

You don't need to spend more than most of the rest of the planet on the military to defend an area of land that's a tiny proportion of the world's surface. Are you sure you've been paying attention to US foreign policy over the last hundred years?