The US military recently said they face a “crisis of national security” because they have the potential to lose a war against Russia or China:
The United States faces a “crisis of national security” because its historic military supremacy has eroded drastically, leaving it likely unable to fight more than a single war at a time, according to a congressionally chartered report released Wednesday.
“U.S. military superiority is no longer assured and the implications for American interests and American security are severe,” said the report, which was issued by the National Defense Strategy Commission, an independent agency whose board is appointed by the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
The report concludes that the Defense Department isn’t financially or strategically set up to wage two wars at once and could even lose a war against China or Russia individually.
“The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict,” it said.
The commission’s co-chairmen — Eric Edelman, who was undersecretary of defense during the presidency of George W. Bush, and retired Adm. Gary Roughead, a former chief of naval operations bridging the Bush and Obama administrations — are scheduled to testify before both Armed Services committees later this month.
Johnny Michael, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said the agency welcomed the report, calling it “a stark reminder of the gravity of these issues, and a call to action.”
“The department will carefully consider each of the recommendations put forward by the commission as part of continuing efforts to strengthen our nation’s defense, and looks forward to working with the commission and the Congress to do so,” he said.
In a post for the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit international affairs policy institute, Edelman wrote Wednesday that “China and Russia, seeking regional hegemony and global power projection, are pursuing military buildups aimed at neutralizing U.S. strengths,
Image: Eric Edelman’The United States has significantly weakened its own defense due to political dysfunction and decisions made by both Republicans as well as Democrats,’ wrote former Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, the commission’s co-chairman.Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency/Getty Images file
At the same time, “the United States has significantly weakened its own defense due to political dysfunction and decisions made by both Republicans as well as Democrats,” he wrote, citing defense budget cuts “with pronounced detrimental effects on the size, modernization, and readiness of the military.”President Donald Trump last week asked the Defense Department to cut $16 billion next year from its budget, which currently is at $716 billion — a 2¼ percent reduction.
“U.S. forces will need additional resources to train to high levels of proficiency across a broader and more technologically challenging range of potential missions than in the recent past, particularly those missions focusing on advanced military threats from China and Russia,” the commission wrote.
But money isn’t the only roadblock, it concluded.
The commission welcomed the National Defense Strategy (PDF), a summary of U.S. military goals that Defense Secretary James Mattis released in January.
The unclassified public version of the strategy document was widely criticized for being short on specifics, including force levels and cost, and the commission urged that more of it be declassified so it could be “used as a benchmark for measuring implementation of the strategy.”
The document “points the Department of Defense and the country in the right direction,” the commission said, but it “does not adequately explain how we should get there.”
The 116-page report identifies outer space and cyberspace as particular problem points, among many others.
“Because of our recent focus on counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency, and because our enemies have developed new ways of defeating U.S. forces, America is losing its advantage in key warfighting areas such as power projection, air and missile defense, cyber and space operations, anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare, long-range ground-based fires, and electronic warfare,” it said.
“Many of the skills necessary to plan for and conduct military operations against capable adversaries — especially China and Russia — have atrophied.”
The report closes with a jarring warning:
“The costs of failing to meet America’s crisis of national defense and national security will not be measured in abstract concepts like ‘international stability’ and ‘global order.’ They will be measured in American lives, American treasure, and American security and prosperity lost. It will be a tragedy — of unforeseeable but perhaps tremendous magnitude — if the United States allows its national interests and national security to be compromised through an unwillingness or inability to make hard choices and necessary investments.
“That tragedy will be all the more regrettable because it is within our power to avoid it,” the panel said. (source, source)
The only reason for putting out such a story would be to, using “fear” and “national security” as a justification, to increase what is already the world’s largest military budget for the world’s most powerful army.
It is true that Russia and China are the second and third most powerful armies respectively in the world. However, to look at them independently as competitors, even “allies” against the USA is to ignore history.
Russia and China in spite of their public claims are not and never have been friends except out of temporary necessity. Russia has always been rightly concerned about China attempting to use their large population to seize Siberia to feed her resource-hungry people, and so they recognize the need to be close but not “too close.” There is a strong element of dislike between the two, and any signs of closeness between the two is based on attempts to protect themselves from outside (i.e. US) influence rather than by any sort of genuine friendship.
But in addition to the USA, there are also other rivalries that both nations have to contend with. China’s biggest competitor in East Asia is Japan, who also as one of the strongest armies on earth. Germany is the same for Russia, who also has a powerful army and due to her alliance with the US and NATO is supported by the equally strong armies of the UK, France, and Turkey. If the US is a “foreign army” from across the globe, both nations are surrounded by neighbors that while not equal in strength are comparable and if they would not be able to win, they could put up a considerable fight.
Finally, there is also the question of internal decay. The problems of Russia are well-known and I have written about them before, as they include but are not limited to a declining population, mass migration from Central Asia, a declining internal infrastructure, a lack of an economy, exploding disease rates, and general social disorder. China’s problems are equally serious and include a lack of agricultural infrastructure so much that she heavily relies on foreign food imports, an unstable male to female population ratio caused by government-enforced abortion and sterilization, an inability to innovate without stealing or copying ideas from the western world, and having her main market for her products be to the western world that she relies on for income.
As I noted before, the war against Russia and China that has been planned since the end of World War II seems to revolve around Mackinder’s theory for world population movements. China and Russia, while very powerful, are in a comparatively weaker position than they appear, and given the current re militarization of Germany and Japan while a rise of nationalism is taking place in both nations and across the Western World, it is but a sign of impending conflict to come in the future.
There is no “crisis” of the US military happening right now, but only the appearance of a potential “crisis” in order to drive further militarization for the planned coming war. It is asserting a thesis for a problem that is being created to which the proposed solution will be war.