The U.S. Navy’s USS Gerald R. Ford, right, and USS Harry S. Truman in the Atlantic Ocean, June 4, 2020.
It is a world that bristles with hostiles — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — any of which could trigger war. Yet the consensus is that the U.S. military is, on many counts, vastly unprepared.
Actually, that consensus comes principally from analysts at conservative think tanks, many of them former military, who report their findings in the conservative media, in keeping with the right's long-standing doctrine that America must maintain a military without peer if we are to retain power in the world.
The subject of deficiencies in our military hardly gets a mention in liberal media, at least over the past year and a half reviewed here. There, attention to the military tends to budgetary politics and the progressive element's lobbying to divert spending on defense so as to fund domestic social programs.
Now running to over $800 billion a year, the defense budget seems gargantuan, but the prime measure is priorities — what the nation should be able to afford for defense as a percentage of its gross domestic product.
The chart shows the steady decline of defense outlays relative to GDP. Defense spending reached a postwar high of 9.1% in 1968 but never fell below 4.5% even in the 1970s, reaching a high of 6% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup that helped win the Cold War. As seen, it is currently about 3.3% of GDP.
That has consequences. The Heritage Foundation recently rated the U.S. military as "weak" in its annual index of military strength, the first such rating in the index's nine year existence. Its criterion is whether our military would prevail in two conflicts at once.
AT SEA
The Navy and Air Force are the most-cited as besieged with problems. A war with China would be a naval war, and the United States Navy is not at all ready. We have a navy that has half the number of ships as during the Cold War but is expected to be on station around the world at the same mission pace. The Navy has said for years that to be capable of defeating peer adversaries like China, it must have 350 ships and another 150 unmanned or lightly manned vessels for a total of 500.
But in the 15 years up to the end of the Trump administration, the U.S. fleet grew from 291 war ships to a meager 296. During the same period, China’s navy grew to 360 from 216. Naval old hands are quick to point out that much of China’s navy consists of small patrol boats, no match for the U.S. Navy's fire power. True, but China is upgrading rapidly.
Former President Trump promised a 355-ship navy when campaigning in 2016, a promise quickly forgotten. Instead, … Click to continue reading
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Is the U.S. Military Ready for War? Not by a Long Shot.
Our war today is simply this: We need to decentralize and change the culture to one that demands transparency in the systems that govern over us.
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These are rich topics. Join us in the solutions. Decentralization and Transparency are key:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/embrace-decentralized-systems-fear