I have respect for Kyle Mizokami, and especially so for Popular Mechanics.
But it's budget season and they'll print what the Pentagon wants.
Guess he wants more money.
And no where in the article does the Air Force Chief say that the US is no longer dominant.
Meh.
Where does he stand on Shatner’s Captain vs. Colonel in the Space Force?
Is this a Fundraiser by the General??
The new fiscal year cometh.
They are the kings at resting on their laurels.
The U.S. will get smashed in a war against China. It lost military superiority back during the Obama era.
The military no longer can fund repairs or training. Many of its planes are useless.
What a maroon
Besides being seditious in broadcasting any such thing, tone deaf to what is going on in the news
Mattis is outed as at least seditious in Woodward’s book.
People are bracing to hear any negative thing about the president in the post Labor Day election period
I believe that in the Star Trek franchise time period of the future, the mainstay of defense within our planet’s atmosphere is upgraded B-52’s.
Anyone who wants to fight Russia and/or China is a suicidal lunatic. They don’t want to fight us either, they aren’t that stupid or suicidal.
Number of military aircraft by country, top 10:
Our Air Force is certainly not our weak link. Neither is our Navy. The only thing in the article I do agree with is that the future is in drones and unmanned aircraft. I think that the title of the article was merely for shock effect.
Our armed forces is more than sufficient if we would stop trying to be the world police. Trump’s strategy has been to push our allies into stepping up and carrying their share of the load.
Our greatest vulnerability is our lack of in-house manufacturing capability. We have allowed ourselves to become too dependent on China and other countries for our manufacturing. Our ability to step up domestic production is what saved us in WW2.
Fortunately, the Navy and Marine Corps are still dominant.
Need MORE Critical Race Theory training!!!! ASAP!!!
A lot of this depends entirely on what kind of war we’re talking about. Russia or China attacking the United States would be complete and utter suicide. Russia’s long range power projection capabilities are aging and vulnerable. They have some more modern air power, but nothing that would enable them to survive long in any sort of encounter with the US military and we’d see them moving toward us weeks in advance. China’s navy is an interdiction fleet with modest power projection more suited to punishing third world nations that fail to honor Chinese contracts (aimed squarely at sub-Saharan Africa).
A fight over neutral territory (e.g. Turkey) would go much the same way. Russia would likely do a little better than China there, but US forces would obliterate what air assets they have, leaving their ground forces vulnerable. No direct conflict goes well there for either of them.
Where things get more interesting is a confrontation at or within their respective borders. Defeating either of them would require a massive build-up of US forces. They would see it coming and prime everything they’ve got to resist. They’ve been preparing for just this sort of conflict for decades, and both of them have a significant amount of hardware and manpower to throw at home defense. We would beat either of them, eventually, but it would take a long time (several years at least), burn through massive amounts of equipment and personnel, and risk all-out nuclear war.
Power projection is just plain difficult to do. It took a while for us to build up just for an invasion of Iraq. That was done with plenty of regional support, including bases and land that were accessible to us and relatively safe, all against a military that was much smaller and equipped with older, less effective weapons. China and Russia are vastly better equipped and we would have to be fully committed - as a nation - to sustain the kinds of losses we’re not used to seeing in order to achieve the sort of victory Americans expect.
Russia spends 3.9% of its pathetic GDP (one-twentieth the size of our GD) on defense. We spend 3.4% of our monster GDP on defense, and the chiefs want more money.