As much as I love me some Founding Fathers, when they lived, 40 minutes got you a few miles away if you traveled with all available speed. Today, the other side of the world is only 40 minutes away on a ballistic trajectory. (And I'm not even counting information warfare where it's less than a second away.)

> The Founding Fathers did not approve of expeditionary warfare.

I don't know that that's necessarily the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War