...plus hitch-hiking rides to the Space Station.
I can’t think of a better way for our enemy to stage ambushes.
France has those two Mistral ships that it won’t sell to Russia. Why doesn’t the U.S. buy those?
Marines cant be paratroopers?
What kind of “global crises around Europe and western Africa” are there that Europe and/or western Africa cannot respond to themselves?
Seventy years ago, the industrial might of the United States not only lavishly equipped our own armed forces and projected their power to every corner of the earth, we also lavishly equipped the armed forces of our allies. American production was such that we built weapons systems and support systems nobody else could even think of building because they simply did not have the resources. We built them not because we had to, but because we could. And to top it off, we had enough leftover capacity to build two different types of atomic weapons; bombs that five years earlier were no more than theories on a chalkboard.
And we threw it all away.
Foreign vessels from where? Nobody in Europe has a fraction of the amphibious lift that the U.S. does so I hardly think they have any ships to spare.
You read through US history and you find our military has declined/reduced between wars mostly by Democrat presidents.