self-licking ice cream cone
n.— «For grateful military leaders, there was merit in reinforcement for its own sake. One senior general compared the existing force to a “self-licking ice cream cone”—so small and weak that it consumed most of its resources in the effort to supply and defend itself.» —“Deadline Squeezes Somalia Mission” by Barton Gellman San Francisco Chronicle (California) Oct. 8, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...