Although the US spends multiples of what any other country spends on its military, our military has serious deficiencies. From Paul Gilbert at themostimportantnews.com:
(Guest article by Paul Gilbert) The Heritage Foundation publishes an annual Index of U.S. Military Strength, which assesses capacity, capability and readiness of each of the services, and rates them “very strong,” “strong,” “marginal,” “weak” or “very weak”. Based on a broad range of personnel issues; degradation of our forces and equipment from long-term involvement in the Middle East; our inability to adequately maintain and upgrade our current inventory of aircraft and warships … with reliability; and, in some instances, the strategic superiority of our adversaries, our military’s overall rating was “marginal”.
A GAO study released in early 2019 detailed ongoing, critical problems in recruiting, training and sustaining front-line and support personnel across all services and at all levels and, purportedly, the Pentagon has no comprehensive strategy to address them. Given millennials’ attitudes toward the military, this situation will likely worsen.
Even if these issues are adequately addressed, ensuring that our military has state-of-the-art aircraft, warships, equipment and armaments is a must … and requires the application of cutting-edge, but reliable, technologies. There are troubling signs here!
For example, as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald Ford nears delivery, most of its elevators are not operational, so aircraft and armaments cannot reach the flight deck. Hydraulic systems were replaced with electro-magnetic technology, and the “bugs” have not yet been worked out. Similarly, the dependable steam-operated aircraft catapult and arresting systems have also given way to electro-magnetic ones because they are, theoretically, upgrades … except that they don’t yet work.
