Actually, that's actively deployed ground troops at a distance of several thousands of miles from home soil. The US standing army is over 1 million strong - counting reserves and guard. In addition there's the Navy (335,000), the Marines (200,000), Air Force (350,000) and Coast Guard (46,000). In a straight fight, the US forces could probably take the rest of the world - i.e. you do get value for your tax dollar. That's why there are no straight fights to be had...
The US military is not a particularly inefficient operation, and keeping about 200,000 troops worldwide operationally deployed is just not cheap. No other country could do anything close to it. Western Europe can only deploy barely half that, and not indefinitely, and it needs logistic support from the US to do even that much.
Rummie made many mistakes, costing thousands of American lives, causing tens of thousands of soldiers to return physically disabled and hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. But it's not his fault (or anyone else's) that the army can only deploy one-fifth of its full strength in theater.
If you bring back the draft, you can increase the number of boots on the ground. If you start accepting much higher casualty rates, you can run the war cheaper (although, without a draft, it would probably be impossible to replace the casualties fast enough). If you're willing to increase military spending, you can (perhaps) have a small increase in the size of the military without a draft .
Or you have to accept that the US simply can't do it. It can destroy countries, it can kill hundreds of thousands of innocents, but it can't militarily obtain a safer world for itself.
