Boy, oh boy, do I hate (sometimes) to be proven right:
Despite having the largest military budget in the world, the United States probably wouldn't be ready if it were forced into a "great power war" with [Red] China, Russia, Iran or North Korea, says the nation's top general.
Military leaders voiced concern on Wednesday about their ability to fight a war with global powers like Russia, telling a congressional hearing that a lack of resources and training was weighing on America's combat readiness, reported Reuters.
U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that if the Army were to fight a "great power war" with any one of four major potential foes, he had "grave concerns" about the readiness of his forces.
"(The Army) is not at the levels that can execute satisfactorily ... in terms of time, cost in terms of casualties or cost in terms of military objectives," Milley said.
Also speaking at the hearing, about the Fiscal 2017 budget request for the military, Air Force [Commissar] Deborah James said half of her combat forces were not "sufficiently ready" for fighting against a country like Russia.
"Money is helpful for readiness but freeing up the time of our people to go and do this training is equally important," James said.
Earlier this month Air Force officials said they were facing a shortage of more than five hundred fighter pilots, a gap expected to widen to more than eight hundred by 2022. [emphasis added]
Nothing I haven't brought to your attention on many previous occasions. Speaking of which, here's another happy reminder from just as week ago:
Most Americans favor cutting America's defense budget in key areas including nuclear weapons and missile defense, a new survey shows.
The University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey, taken between December 20th and February 1st and released Wednesday, finds a majority of the seven thousand respondents supports $2 billion in cuts to air power, $4 billion to ground forces, $2 billion to naval forces, $3 billion to nuclear weapons and $1 billion to missile defense. [emphasis added]
Here are America's military leaders, our top commanders, coming right out and saying that we're functionally defenseless against all our enemies, and a majority of Americans wants to make that lethal debility even worse.
Or, in other words, "fundamental transformation". We are no longer a planetary hegemon, a global superpower, a great power, or a power of any sort. We are a gigantic playpen, overrun with unruly, bratty, profane, degenerate, greedy, envious, squabbling children, tantruming each other to death in the streets (i.e. "making America great again") while our "geopolitical foes" prepare to conquer and destroy us.
The Obama Doctrine triumphant.
Only question is which one or combination thereof will put us out of our misery, and how soon.
UPDATE: Red China seems to be the top candidate:
The confrontation has been building for the past three years, as [Red] China has constructed artificial islands off its southern coast and installed missiles and radar in disputed waters, despite U.S. warnings. It could come to a head this spring, when an arbitration panel in The Hague is expected to rule that [Red] China is making “excessive” claims about its maritime sovereignty.
What makes this dispute so explosive is that it pits an American president who needs to affirm his [snicker] credibility as a strong leader against a risk-taking Chi[Comm] president who has shown [justifiable] disregard for U.S. military power and who faces potent political enemies at home.
“This isn’t Pearl Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of August,’" says Kurt Campbell, former assistant [commissar] of state for Asia, referring to the chain of miscalculations that led to World War I. The administration, he says, is facing “another red line moment where it has to figure out how to carry through on past warnings.” [emphases added]
And we know what he did in the last "red line" moment, don't we? He totally caved on his past warnings, and now the most dangerous region of the planet is a roiling cauldron or chaos and war drowning in its own "to the horse's bridles" oceans of blood - and that's being exported to Europe and ,yes, the good ol' US of A. Anybody think the South China Sea issue will be any different? And that will bring us closer to a Sino-American war we cannot win, and about which we will have no choice.
Ironic, given the ongoing upheavals of Trumpmania, that this constitutes the "calm before the storm".
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