The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Three: Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-three-insecurity/
There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.
America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.
In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 Americans deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.
The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.
Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?
Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithfully adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.
The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but to the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.
Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and “white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”
The result of such fixations is a radical drop-off in enlistments, perhaps in aggregate reaching a 40,000-person shortfall in all the services. Stranger still, the military remains in denial, blaming the lack of interest in military service to out-of-shape youth, competition from a robust job market, gang affiliation, or criminal upticks—almost anything other than the creation of a hostile climate to the one demographic that has died at twice its numbers in the general population in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are other symptoms of our calcifying military. Our arsenals are emptying as a direct result either of our massive arms shipments to Ukraine or a multibillion-dollar abandonment of weapons in Afghanistan. And our defense industries shrink.
Whether Javelins, artillery shells, or missiles, the military is short of munitions, and will be for years.
Our submarine fleet, once the hallmark of our naval superiority, is severely crippled and underfunded—a fact compounded by the dearth of shipyards. The entire navy is a shadow of its former Reagan-era strength. Our weapons systems in theory are unrivaled, but so expensive and scarce to be of dubious utility in a real war, given the rapid consumption of munitions—as we see from the insatiable rate of expenditure in Ukraine.
And while the military enjoys excellent leadership from the colonel level downward, our top brass has scant record of success. What was disturbing about Afghanistan was not just the humiliating flight and careless abandonment of an entire theater arsenal, but the lack of any repercussions to the culpable officers in charge, both in theater and in Washington.
The more wars we stalemate or lose—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libyan bombing—the more there is little introspection about the causes of such defeats.
Can the U.S. restore its military in time? Only if it were to drop woke and return to meritocracy, stop the politicization of the services, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, end the revolving-door profiteering of defense-contractor generals, and invest in war-production industries. The only way to recruit American youth is to stop berating millions of them for their purported sins, and get out of the abortion, transgendered, race, and sex virtue-signaling business.
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