“The US military is the most expensive organization in 3,000 years of human history and has degenerated into an instrument for selling or grifting overpriced military hardware.”
It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?
One reason is financial. All warfare has an underlying economic basis and a nation’s military power reflects its economic structure. Today in America the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar and the unlimited printing press of fiat currency it enables means current US defense spending is essentially covered by debt: indeed at least 30% of the current national debt consists of military overspend from the so-called Global War on Terror. This reality has created an absence of strategic discipline, and a military policy that prioritizes a tiny guild of contractors feeding an obese top-heavy structure rather than winning wars.
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