WASHINGTON – The US military may not be able to win one war — let alone two — as the Pentagon struggles to keep its forces equipped against potential threats from China and Russia, according a new report on American military strength.
Years of underfunding and “poorly defined priorities” has led the military to become “weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on the global stage,” the conservative Heritage Foundation said in its annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.”
“[T]he current U.S. military force is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict,” the report said. “The force would probably not be able to do more and is certainly ill-equipped to handle two nearly simultaneous [major conflicts.]”
At the same time, the possibility of two-front fighting has increased as Russia continues to wage war on Ukraine and China grows increasingly aggressive in the Pacific, according to the report.
“In the aggregate, the United States’ military posture can only be rated as ‘weak,’” the report said.
Across the services, the report rated only the Marine Corps as “strong” in the think tank’s assessment of force capacity, capability and readiness. While the Army achieved a “marginal” rating, the Space Force and Navy were labeled “weak” and the Air Force bottomed out at “very weak.”
“In general, the military services continue to prioritize readiness and have seen some improvement over the past few years, but modernization programs, especially in shipbuilding, continue to suffer as resources are committed to preparing for the future, recovering from 20 years of operations and offsetting the effects of inflation,” the report said.
That spells serious trouble as the US gears up to face a rapidly growing and increasingly aggressive Chinese military, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said Tuesday.
“The particular problem with that is if you look at our priority theater, the Indo-Pacific, the two priority services are the Navy and the Air Force – and those seem to be the ones that are doing the worst,” the House Armed Services Committee member told reporters.
To strengthen its might, the US must be willing to invest in military hardware – ships, missiles and other weaponry – to supply the force with the equipment needed to prepare for future conflict, according to the report.
“At present, the [Biden] administration’s proposed defense budget for [fiscal year] 2023 falls far short of what the services need to regain readiness and to replace aged equipment,” the report said, “and Congress’s intention to increase the proposed budget by 5[%] accounts for barely half of the current rate of inflation, which is nearing 10[%].”
The armed forces also have capacity problem – not having enough personnel, weapons and other equipment to fight a war. The report rates the Navy worse than its sister services, dropping its capacity rating two notches from “marginal” to “very weak” – the lowest on the scale.
Part of the issue is the Biden administration’s diplomacy-first mindset of “substitut[ing] soft power for hard power,” which Gallagher called “naïve at best.”
“I fear as you look at the geopolitical environment, we are going to find ourselves in a competition with China or Taiwan within the next few years if we continue down this path of naive disarmament,” he said.
Gallagher based his timeline on that of former Navy Indo-Pacific commander Adm. Phil Davidson, who told lawmakers last year that China could try to take control of Taiwan by 2027.
At the center of the hard-power problem is the Navy’s shrinking fleet size, according to the report. To fight in two wars, the think tank said the Navy would need about 400 ships – a drastic bump from the current 292 ships the service said it had as of last week.
In 2018, Congress passed a law mandating that the Navy reach a target of 355 ships “as soon as possible.”
Instead, the service has cut ships faster than they’ve built them.
But even as vessel numbers have dwindled, Navy operations have not slowed – creating an additional hurdle to growing the fleet, Heritage senior defense researcher Dakota Wood said Tuesday. The US has about half the ships it had during the Cold War, but the number of ships at sea at any given time – about 100 – has not changed since at least the early 1990s.
“You’re working your ships twice as hard, the crews twice as hard, maintenance problems mount, so when it finally gets into the [ship]yard, there’s more work that has to be done than was anticipated,” Wood said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese navy already has 355 ships and plans to add about 65 more by 2026, according to the Pentagon’s annual China military report published in November. By 2030, China is expected to have 460 ships.
“The British Royal Navy … is down to a mere 17 or 18 surface combatants total,” Wood said. “China’s adding almost the equivalent of the British Royal Navy to its own fleet almost every year, certainly every two years.”
But the Navy alone cannot fight off impending threats from China and Russia – the Heritage report demonstrates that the entiire military must invest more in hard power, Gallagher said.
“The lesson is we have to rebuild our munitions industrial base,” Gallagher said. “The Defense Production Act could be modernized and used for actual defense purposes, not for baby formula.”
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the report’s specifics, saying he had not seen it, but called the US military “the strongest fighting force the world has ever known.”
“Every day around the globe, the men and women of our armed forces safeguard vital US national interests by backstopping diplomacy, confronting aggression, deterring conflict, projecting strength and protecting the American people,” said the spokesman, Air Force Brig Gen. Patrick Ryder.
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Maybe its time to start living within our means instead of maintaining a worldwide empire….
Biden is more likely to submit the US to the globalist empire than maintain an independent one.
1000 up votes!
800 billion dollars is underfunded?
Perhaps the problem is “US national interests around the globe”.
Isn’t that the definition of an oxymoron?
Your problem is that you employ logic and reason when you do your thinking. That’s so last millennium. It also proves that you’re a white supremacist.
Let me help you: It is possible, but not guaranteed, that Russia would kick US ass in a head-to-head war with conventional means. Therefore, the US needs to irritate and harass not only Russia, but China as well. There is virtually no chance the US (and its NATO stooges) can defeat Russia AND China simultaneously. So when the US provokes Russia and China into WWIII, the US thereby guarantees victory!!! See how proper post-modern logic-free thinking works?
And we have to act fast, because of climate change.
Now take your booster and eat your cricket porridge.
And have you donated to your local Democrat candidates yet?
Also, where is your Ukraine flag? You should have one of those prominently displayed on your front lawn, on your Twitter page and on your N95 surgical face mask.
Thank you for your cooperation.
ROFLMAO!
This was good. Thank you. Laughed my ass off.
For Uncle Schlomo, winning is secondary…getting dem’ shekels is what’s really important.
So stay the fuck home and defend the Tex-Mex border with all those marines who’ve been occupying Okinawa for 3/4 of a century. Remember when it was only billions and not trillion$?
War Is A Racket, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC:
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Air Force without planes; can’t help but just laugh at this point.
They’re on a trans mission.
Someone hadda say it.
Drain the SPR. Give away all our weaponry. 6uild 6ack 6etter.
Government should pull itself up by its bootstraps and stop buying avocado toast!
People should abolish government and eat all the avocado toast they’ll now be able to afford with the saved bucks.
Cui bono? The Big Picture
In short: US industrial, economic and social decay, all entirely self inflicted over the past several decades, have led to the decline of the USA as a functional society and hence to the impending loss of its unipolar global hegemony. This is a situation that the megalomaniacal “indispensable nation, shining beacon on a hill” ideologues simply cannot accept.
It is vital to understand exactly how this hollowed out mockery of a former empire continues to limp along in a moribund fashion right now, just prior to its complete self-inflicted collapse:
Most important is to understand how the US fraudulent “economy” works. The best commentator regarding this is the brilliant Real World Economist* Professor Michael Hudson whose works are too numerous for me to mention https://michael-hudson.com/ In brief, the US economy largely operates as a global blood sucking parasite, by extracting wealth from the rest of the world and by keeping weaker countries under the its jackboot (AKA economic Neocolonialism). The major mechanism for this is the exuberant privilege of the US dollar as the International Reserve Currency, a privilege no other country has.
This scam operates in tandem with other mechanisms that were contrived and designed and tweaked and refined to suit the US “rules based order” ever since Bretton-Woods in 1944 (which established the precursors to the World Bank, WTO and IMF, with the simultaneous designation of the USD as IRC), the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 by Nixon and especially the US creation of the Petrodollar. This was a Godfather type “offer you can’t refuse” that the USA presented to the Middle Eastern Oil producers. It was a protection racket that the Gulf States sequentially signed up to and was completed by 1974. Oil, an essential commodity, could only be bought from the Gulf States in USD, all other currencies were refused. Where could a country get USD from? Why from the USA of course, in exchange for real world products. The Petrodollar enabled the USA to obtain limitless high quality imported products for free by simply electronically “printing” US dollars, quite apart from getting free oil. It was the first class ticket on a gravy train of unimaginable wealth far exceeding the wildest fantasies of the most avaricious, rapacious, greedy robber barons. If the US could get imported goods for free, why bother to fund US domestic industries? Why not offshore their industrial production? So that is exactly what the US did…
All this is coming to an end.
https://thesaker.is/cui-bono-the-big-picture/
Part of the problem is that when a soldier is told to get a hummer and on the way over he blows a trannie it means something different from days of old.
The third rail that politicians and the MSM will not touch is Welfare in its’ thousands of disquised “essential do-good” heads. All together, it probably amounts to ten times the Defense Budget. Welfare (the illegal unconstitutional FSA Vampire Squid) is draining Constitutional Defense, Infrastructure, Corporate Profits Research and Expansions, payrolls, retirements, insurance premiums, product & services costs, etc. Liberal policies esp since LBJ are a certain path to complete and total imminent civil, economic and military destruction. Our Walls and our Shields are down; the Barbarians are inside the Gates. Liberal Government and Army are a joke. History is repeating the destruction of Rome.
This is nonsense, period. Our fighting personnel are well trained in the vital following combat areas:
1. Gender/pronoun identification and quantification.
2. Marching in high heels.
3. CRT.
4. DIE, oh sorry, DEI.
5. The 1619 Project.
I feel for the youth if there is a Draft again. You’d have to take the Clot Shot. You’d be charged with a Hate Crime if you complained about the Queers. You’d be fighting for Nazis; your commanders are idiots; all the equipment warehouses have been emptied to supply the Nazis; our Allies are weak and useless commanded by women; you can’t even say fuck it and go to Canada. I’d look into going to Belize or English speaking Ghana.