News & Comment
US Think Tank Warns of US Military Falling Behind Russia and China

News

According to CNBC:

U.S. defense modernization efforts are "failing to keep pace" when compared with its two big adversaries, and American forces are "poorly postured to meet key challenges in Europe and East Asia," according to a starkly worded new report from think-tank Rand.

As tensions with North Korea heighten, Rand's 190-page report, entitled "U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous World," also discussed war scenarios with NATO-Russia involving the Baltic states. It also broke down a possible U.S.-China clash over Taiwan and gaps in existing U.S. capabilities.

With those factors in mind, the Rand report's authors said that the nation's armed forces are "insufficiently trained and ready" when looking at the active service components. That assessment comes despite the U.S. military presence in several regions of the world, and ongoing anti-terrorism missions and the war in Afghanistan, which is nearing its 20th year.

"In short, providing the military power called for by the United States' ambitious national security strategy, which has never been easy, has recently become considerably more challenging," said the report.

"The coincidence of this new reality with a period of constrained defense budgets has led to a situation in which it is now far from clear that our military forces are adequate for the tasks being placed before them," the authors wrote.

More tellingly, Rand's analysis also noted that the capabilities of China and Russia have advanced so far they could potentially beat American forces in certain situations.

"Put more starkly, assessments in this report will show that U.S. forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight, despite the United States outspending China military forces by a ratio of 2.7:1 and Russia by 6:1," read the report. "The nation needs to do better than this."

CNBC reached out to the Defense Department for comment on Saturday, but did not receive an immediate reply. However, Rand's study was funded in part by the department, suggesting they are aware of its contents.

Comment

The Rand organisation is a key pillar of the American military-industrial complex and this warning comes at the time of American legislative preoccupation with tax cuts forced by the American elite because of out-of-control government spending. The American defence establishment is concerned that military spending should not be affected.

The United States of America and the West in general are facing severe long-term financial catastrophe as ‘welfare’ spending continues to take the largest portion of government budgets due to the breakdown of family and community support caused by the Western concepts of freedom and individualism. Whereas, previously, a man would be honoured to spend from his personal income on immediate dependents - his aged parents, his wife and children, his near relatives, his neighbours, the poor and needy – Western values are encouraging men to spend their wealth on themselves only, leaving government to carry an impossible burden. In effect, the West has embraced a socialist solution to a Capitalist problem. US governments’ spending on ‘welfare’ is now in trillions of dollars, yet the weak, poor and needy still suffer tremendously because Western governments do not have the administrative capability to care for individuals in the way that their families and communities can. Meanwhile, the elite continue to pressure government for tax cuts and reductions in spending, particularly as changing demographics mean that vastly greater proportions of the population will be of older age than previously.

Ultimately this impossible contradiction will break the West, just as government overspending broke the Communist Soviet Union.

However, there is another critical point to be made here. Despite US financial constraints, the current American military budget is not only the largest in the world but is actually almost equal to the combined military spending of the entire rest of the world. How is it possible that such vast spending is not enough?

To answer this, it is necessary to realise that America is located at the opposite side of the earth from most of the rest of the world and so needs to spend vast sums to project its power to maintain its position as a global superpower. This is in contrast to Europe, Russia and China whose primary military concerns are usually in their immediate neighbourhoods. But, most significantly, it is necessary to note that the greatest and most-prolonged American military engagement is in the Muslim world, where the American military is engaged in multiple ongoing conflicts, operations and wars. It is in fact this that is breaking the American back, just as the jihad in Afghanistan was instrumental in breaking the back of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Muslim Ummah is arising out of its comatose despondency and is rejecting the disbelieving foreigner and his imperialist interventions. The world will soon witness, with the permission of Allah, the return of the true and just superpower, the re-established Islamic Khilafah State (Caliphate) on the method of the Prophet (saw) that will bring peace to the entire world and safeguard all of humanity from the oppression of the oppressors.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah