China is engaged in the largest naval buildup in history, and while their crews are untested, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (actual name!) is working hard at training them up. Already, the PLAN has more — if generally smaller — ships than we do. As a regional power (at least for the moment), China’s navy also has an easier mission than the U.S. Navy does, with its global responsibilities to protect our commerce.
Meanwhile, our Navy’s procurement of surface vessels has become an unfunny — not to mention dangerous — joke. The first of our new class of super-modern nuclear-powered supercarriers, the USS Ford, is years behind schedule and billions over budget. That, we could deal with. But the fact that the Navy won’t perform a proper shock test on the Ford means we have no idea how she’ll perform in battle.
Assuming we ever get her battleworthy.
Chinese aerospace engineers are now some of the best in the world, producing stealthy jets and perhaps even taking the lead in the hypersonic missiles that will define the next generation of air power — and put our missile defenses to the ultimate test.
Most chilling though is the increasing contrast between our education systems.
Our saving grace is our burgeoning private space industry, which is driving costs down and attracting engineering talent from all over the world — but will it be enough?
Chinese universities — whose best professors were trained at American universities — graduate more engineers each year than the U.S. By 2017, Chinese engineering graduates outnumbered their American counterparts by eight to one. That ratio is expected to worse to 15-to-one by 2030.
How are we responding to this challenge?
By infesting our STEM classes with malicious critical race theory and using federal loan guarantees to subsidize literally any kind of degree, no matter how ultimately worthless.
At a time when we desperately need to double down on the engineering talent that made this country the most innovative, wealthy, and secure, we are literally doubling down on stupid.
Chinese universities don't do that with their students. They don't sap the life out of their best and brightest. Not at all. In China they're taught that China is totally awesome dude and that being Sino is the best.
Meanwhile American "graduates" are left wondering why life is worth living, much less striving for.
I didn't get that much indoctrination when I was in college. But then, my education was decades ago, in Alabama, and it was getting a computer science degree. That might have sheltered me from the life draining SJW BS that plagues too many BS degrees today.
You know what Chinese engineers don't have to worry about? Being laid off with a family to support so their employer could hire H1B-visa contract labor from India to replace them, that's what.
Nobody wants to work hard for an engineering degree so they can be treated like garbage by business-school graduates. Better to just get the MBA instead.
We’d be better off getting federal funding and teachers unions out of our educational system completely.
Education in the US is sabotaged from the very start, with early-grade reading stubbornly not focused on basic phonics and phonemes. The common core has equally undermined grade-school math.
And yes, the incessant propagandizing from kindergarten on is a waste of time, along with worse.