This week, the Heritage Foundation released its Military Strength Index for 2023, calling our military’s overall strength “low. “This does not mean that our military is weak, it is still the most powerful in the world. Rather, the aim of the report is to assess the extent to which our military can preserve and our national interests.
A “low” score means we can’t achieve our security goals or credibly deter our adversaries. Short and long term challenge.
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There is much we can do to achieve our long-term goals. In the Reagan years, when our military was strong enough to confront and deter the Soviet Union, we spent more than five percent of our GDP on defense each year.
Today, we only spend about 3%, which is enough to meet our preparedness needs. We want to respend 5% degrees if we want to confront and deter the Chinese Communist Party, as well as figures like Russian President Vladimir Putin. . This does mean raising taxes; it means redefining our priorities for federal spending so that our government can adequately “provide a common defense,” the first burden of our Constitution.
Our weapons progression also wants to be reworked. Each branch of the service is plagued by disasters of origin, caused by political forces and profit-making motives that care little about building and deploying decisive weapons. This procedure should involve more directly the armed forces, which will use the weapons, and avoid the bloated bureaucracy of the Pentagon.
But our military also faces a lot of short-term disorders, and those disorders are just as urgent to address. In all branches of our military, the U. S. military has been in the military. The U. S. is facing a recruitment crisis. The army, in which I served the last years of the Cold War: lost about 15,000 infantrymen in its recruitment target. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps expect to lose or meet their recruitment goals, but only by accessing their backlog lists. This means that those branches will have more difficulty reaching their numbers in the coming years.
What can this hiring problem do? The Biden administration’s difficult COVID-19 policies have been a major factor. More than 1700 sailors have been laid off from the Navy for refusing to comply with Biden’s mandatory vaccination policy, enacted in August 2021, and thousands more may be laid off soon.
The Army National Guard is preparing to lay off 14,000 infantrymen over the next two years. Although President Joe Biden declared that “the pandemic is over” more than a month ago, his authoritarian COVID-19 mandates for the military remain in place. They have derailed the military careers of thousands of brave men and women and threaten to derail thousands more.
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Then, of course, there are the policies and awakened commands instituted in our military under the leadership of Biden and his political minions at the Pentagon. Air Force cadets are taught to commit “microaggressions” by replacing terms like “you,” “terrorists” and “mom and dad” with terms deemed “less offensive. “Bright and courageous young men and women enlist to fight and protect their country and instead find themselves lectured about race and gender identity and pronouns.
This nonsense has no position in our army, but now it is given priority over the readiness and excellence of the army. I can assure you that he has no position in the forces of Russia and China. To repel this trend, I have introduced a national crusade to prevent the state vigil readiness to kill in our military.
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The greatest and surest of the CCP’s ambitions, or Putin’s aggression, is the strength of the U. S. military. If we allow our armed forces to stagnate, if we cannot cope with the demanding situations posed by our adversaries, we lose our ability to deter. to them.
Our lack of preparation and Biden strength puts Americans and the rest of the world facing the threat of catastrophic war and devastating conflict.
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Mike Pompeo is a Fox News contributor, former U. S. secretary of state. U. S. and former director of the Central Inteligencia. Es Fellow of the Hudson Institute.