There is a lot to criticize about America’s current military – and I’ve criticized it – but there’s another problem no one seems to want to talk about. It’s scary as hell. The United States is not ready for the kind of war we are seeing played out in Ukraine, a peer-to-peer conventional fight that is rewriting the rules of what we thought war was supposed to be. And, with leadership in the White House sitting in a rocker staring slack-jawed at Matlock reruns, we are not in a position to fix what will mean defeat in our next real war.
This is not solely about wokeness and how the officer corps has embraced the ridiculous shibboleths of the progressive left regarding race, gender, and the climate scam, but wokeness relates to the problem that the Ukraine War has revealed. When the leadership is focused on ridiculous frivolities like “white nationalism” and trans idiocy, it is not integrating the massive changes to how we fight that we need to compete on a modern battlefield.
And we do need massive changes. The old wisdom is that the military always fights the last war. Now, we’re trying to fight the last two wars. We are trying to refight the conventional Cold War model that won the Gulf War while also fighting the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. What we are not preparing to fight is the kind of war we are seeing in Ukraine.
The Russo-Ukraine War is a test bed for new technologies overlaid over old styles of warfare, particularly the static, dug-in trench warfare of World War I. What is different? A lot. For one thing, electronic warfare (EW) is an enormous new factor. You know all those awesome precision-guided munitions we saw America use in Iraq and Afghanistan? We gave many of them to Ukraine. According to open source reports – I do not know anything secret and would not write about it if I did – the Russians, who are very good at this sort of thing, have figured out how to use EW to defeat them. Remember, GPS is based on radio waves, which can be jammed, spoofed, or otherwise messed with. A missile that misses is useless. Imagine America going into a fight with its limited or completely defeated precision strike capabilities. Yeah, scary, right?
That assumes we have the precision ammunition. We don’t necessarily. We are giving away much of it to Ukraine and Israel, as well as blowing it off slap-fighting the Houthis. There is not an endless supply of this stuff. It’s slow to build and expensive, and hey, those many millions of Third World peasants the Democrats invited into America are the Democrats’ priority. And how fast will we burn through them if we do get into a fight? For that matter, how fast will we burn through our dumb bombs and dumb artillery shells? Everyone wants our 155mm shells; how many do we have? It better be a lot, because that stuff goes fast. People have no conception of how fast we would burn down our ammo stocks in a real war. Think days, not weeks or months.
Here’s what no one talks about because it’s not exciting or cool – America fights with logistics. We overwhelm the enemy with stuff, including stuff that goes “Boom!” In the Gulf War, we moved a city to the middle of the desert, then moved it forward in an attack. But we can’t do that today. Our military-industrial base has withered. The arsenal of democracy has become the gun-safe of democracy. We cannot just spin up to rearm once the next war – which is coming – starts. That goes for artillery tubes, tanks, planes, and ships – the Chinese Navy is now bigger than ours and growing exponentially faster. Maybe their stuff is not as good as ours ship-to-ship – though with the Chinese spies here in America running rampant stealing our secrets because the FBI is busy arresting grandmas for praying at abortion mills, their ships probably are our ships – but the enemy has something we do not have. It’s “quantity.”
The fighting in Ukraine diverges massively from how we train to fight. Look at the drone factor. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are using drones as precision weapons – the web is full of videos of drones taking out tanks, fortifications, and individual soldiers. Our enemies know about it. Hamas used drones to take our IDF defenses on October 7th. Our bases in the Middle East are getting hit with cheap drones; we have taken dead and wounded from them. We’re not droning up like the enemy; we’re not prepared to defend against the swarms of them that are coming.
The Ukrainian and Russians are innovating, adapting, and improvising, finding new solutions to new problems. Our ossified military, which once relied on American ingenuity to win, cannot do that. At the procurement level, our methods of buying new weapons are guaranteed to provide the wrong system for too much money far too late. At the soldier level, innovation will be discouraged by a risk-averse officer corps with warfighting as its last priority. Do you think US troops are going to be able to obtain a bunch of cheap drones and make them into tank killers themselves without going through some arduous process? They innovated in Ukraine, though. Our future foe will be nimble, agile, and run circles around our bureaucracy.
Finally, the disaster in Ukraine is also highlighting another problem – casualties. Right now, we have the worst recruiting crisis in half a century, largely because the military has wholeheartedly allied itself with the enemies of the traditional Americans who once made up our military. Straight, white, Christian – you are the problem, and it is no secret that you are unwanted and that you will be actively discriminated against in favor of people with approved immutable characteristics. Of course, the potential recruits know it – we vets are warning them away from military service. They refuse to enlist. Why would they? To protect “allies” who lock people up for speaking freely? Die protecting Europe’s dictatorships that arrest people for dissent from the Russian dictatorship that arrests people for dissent? Serve under a leadership that hates you and hasn’t unequivocally won a major war in 30 years?
No thanks. Hard pass. That’s what happens when you have a military that is less General George Patton than Command Sergeant Major (sic) Tim Walz.
But, beyond the fact that the current administrations’ flunkies have made it perfectly clear that traditional recruits are unwanted and that their lives will be squandered, is what is happening in Ukraine. Those casualties are astonishing, and if we get into a real war, ours will be too. Think dozens or hundreds of dead a week, every week. Maybe more – a US Navy aircraft carrier has 5,000 sailors, and the Chinese plan to take ours out. Who wants to die in another poorly thought-out and unnecessary adventure pushed by people whose commitment to the fight is not blood but a Ukrainian flag in their username? After Kabul – for which no one was ever fired – does anyone imagine that potential troops do not understand that to the progressive ruling elite, their lives are meaningless?
We have learned nothing from the Ukrainian-Russian War and apparently nothing from any of the other conflicts and potential conflicts going on around the globe. Unless we change course it will catch up with us, but do you think Kamala Harris will do that? Do you think the thought of being commander-in-chief has ever crossed her Chardonnay-addled mind? Did her joy speech about how half of Americans are racist monsters who hate democracy and must be suppressed give you confidence? She’s there for the communism and the bratness.
When our enemies strike, taking advantage of the lessons of Ukraine – and her weakness and incompetence will make that inevitable – our failed military is going to lose hard. You should be scared, but there is no way you are scared enough.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
