US, in the past (eg - iraq) has shown that it can destabilize a region without any effects to the US, not even a mild price increase domestically. So this one is a big degradation from that earlier stance.

And that’s before you compare to the damage bin laden did with 20 people and a million dollars

American has been getting weaker and weaker for 25 years.

on the reflexes - does the term "muscle memory" has any truth in it too?

It's almost entirely in your brain. Less "your muscles remember how to do things" and more "your brain remembers how to do things using your muscles".

The muscles and the nerves within your limbs adapt some - they respond to being used - but they don't have the representation capacity to store action patterns in them.

The spine itself is another matter - it's much more complex and adaptive, it has some capacity, it can learn things. It mostly carries a set of reflexes you get at birth, and some commonly used learned action patterns. Less "how to play the piano" and more "a set of finger motions useful for playing piano". The most studied thing is probably the spinal involvement in gait generation and stabilization of bipedal locomotion.

Now, things would be different if you were an octopus. But humans are pretty centralized, as far as nervous system goes.

without modern product moat, legacy products and infrastructure is useless. It's like Microsoft saying I have excel, Azure and CoPilot.

You are stating generalities when more specific information is easily available.

Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.