This article is very well written.
Right now, the foxes are running the hen house and the future taxpayers (it’s all debt) are getting plucked. The military industrial business model is the same as US private equity (or the mafia). They take over a ‘company’, load it up with debt, and then bleed the carcass dry. And everybody’s in on it. Right now, a Raytheon board director (Lloyd Austin) is running the Defence (re: War) Department, and few US citizens are aware of this violent conflict of interest. The military industrial complex is running the whole show, under the command of General Fuckery.
The core reason America’s military is the same reason my Toyota Vitz fell apart on the highway. Maintenance. America had a strong military generations ago, but those assets have long since depreciated and become liabilities. They keep covering this up by buying shiny new stuff, but that stuff doesn’t even work and it’s all depreciating into dust and fairy dust as we speak.
The problem with American military infrastructure is the problem with American infrastructure in general. It’s all supposed to be run by ‘the market’ and the market does not give a fuck about maintenance, repair, or anything long term. Why would it? It’s algorithmically programmed to think in quarters and not the long term and, as Keynes said, in the long term we’re all dead. If you can make a billion dollar sale now and the liability falls on someone else’s head decades later, who gives a shit? This isn’t the fault of individually evil people, though these are individually evil people. If they didn’t do it the ‘shareholders’ would throw them out and install someone that did. They’re just cogs in the capitalist machine, and war is peak capitalism. Making really expensive products and immediately exploding them? Chef’s kiss.
The US military is overstretched, both physically and politically. The US is said to have somewhere between 750 and 800 military bases in 80 countries. With defense pacts, quid pro quos, both bilateral, and multilateral, the US has many liabilities. Joe Biden apparently believes the US is very powerful and can take care of multiple conflicts. Possible war with Iran, their proxies, the Houthis, and the US obligation to protect Israel by treaty, and political influence. Obviously, in the war in Ukraine, the US seems committed to poking Russia with a stick. Then there is China, with the potential conflict over the South China Sea, and Taiwan. The Biden regime believes it can handle all these conflicts around the world, rejecting the concept of priority. Maybe he thinks the US had a two front war in WWII, and the US can do the same today, despite being a different economy from the 1940s. Another thing, is the US has expensive technology, but has no sustainability in a real war. The Pentagon lobbies for all kinds of futuristic combat programs and expensive toys, that it is a superficial military than people realize. Take the example of Russia and how quickly they were able to retool their economy and evolve their military to the situation on the ground, the Russians easily produce more capacity of supplies than the US and produces more than NATO collectively. Monetary aid to Ukraine does them no measurable good because the US industrial capacity is completely unprepared for a real war. The Russian weakness is distribution; logistics. The US has the most impressive logistics but no capacity. The ship building has been gutted. In a real war with a Great Power, even worse, a peer competitor, the US will face a shortage far sooner than its enemies. It is said somewhere, don’t remember where, that a hot war with China would have the US run out of ammunition in a few weeks. This is despite having the highest military spending in absolute terms than any other country. This is because the US government, the Pentagon, is inefficient. There is a black hole of spending to goes somewhere that Americans don’t know. They are government agencies that cannot be audited. Joe Biden wants to increase taxes for these rabbit holes.