Despite the supposed cease-fire, clearly yes. A blockade is an act of war, and both America and Iran have imposed them on the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump iscurrently in China, where he is apparently attempting to get Chinese help ending the conflict, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
One of the most common criticisms Republicans have of Democratic presidents is that they damage military readiness. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush accused Bill Clinton of such neglect. “The next president will inherit a military in decline,”he said. Donald Trumpclaimedin 2016 that President Barack Obama left the military “depleted,” and recently said that President Joe Biden left it “gutted.”
Well, Trump had a strategy. Find the most serious Alpha Male Warfighter among Fox News’s weekend hosts, put him in charge of the Pentagon, and take the proverbial gloves off. No more of this woke nonsense like “nonwhite male generals” or “following duly enacted treaties.”
The results are coming in: The military is falling to bits.
The most immediate problem is Trump’s consistent, impulsive use of military force, above all his madcap crusade against Iran. This war will certainly get its own chapter in future histories of military catastrophes; maybe even its own class at West Point someday entitled “Things to Avoid.”
All the fighting is leading to serious attrition. Three full U.S. Navy carrier battle groups—that is, a carrier and its complement of support vessels—have been in the field for months, which naturally costs billions and leads to serious wear and tear. The USSGerald R. Ford, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet, has finally been sent back for maintenance and refitting after steaming all over the planet nonstop for 11 months—thelongest such deploymentsince the Vietnam War—which led to all kinds of maintenance and repair issues, including a major fire.
The Navy as a whole could be out of cash intwo months, according to Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle. The U.S. Army, facing a budget shortfall of $4 to $6 billion thanks to all the Trump deployments, iscutting back training exercisesall across the force. The Air Force has lostmany very expensive planes—in particular,an E-3 Sentry, which is literally impossible to replace—and U.S. bases around the Middle East have beenheavily damaged.
According to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), citing a Pentagon report, itwill take yearsto replenish the military’s supply of key munitions, like cruise missiles and interceptors, that have been fired with reckless abandon at Iranian targets. NBC News reports that the Defense Department has bizarrelynot even signednew contracts to boost munition supply. Contrast that with the war in Ukraine, where Bidenlargely handed over older munitionsthat were due to be retired anyway, and replaced them with fresh ones, thereby providing badly needed support to Ukrainian defense and modernizing the American defense industrial base simultaneously.
An important background here is that the Trump administration has not prepared either the public or the military itself for such heavy use. If you read histories of the Second World War, one of the central themes of American victory was the heavy focus on production, logistics, and maintenance. A serious conflict consumestitanicquantities of ships, tanks, trucks, munitions, rubber, fuel, and so on. American war planners met the demand with a tremendous restructuring of the entire economy, with factories of all descriptions overhauled to churn out war materiel.
An Imperial Japanese Army dedicated to cultivating a fanatical warrior spirit—not unlike that espoused by Pete Hegseth, incidentally—got curb-stomped by an adversary that churned out so many fighters and bombers that in 1944, at the very height of the air war in the Pacific, U.S. forces were so overloaded with planes that at certain points they had no choice but tothrow them into the oceanby the dozens. Recall who won that war.
Source: Drudge Report
