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Originally Posted by Undertoad
The American military force is stronger now than it ever has been in history - partly because it's now been used, and is battlefield-hardened with commanders having all sorts of different kinds of experience.
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The military is now so overwhelmed that it cannot even exercise the invasion of Iran. But again, we go right back to the lessons of Vietnam. Same claim was made by those same Curtis LeMay types. As a result, the US was so pathetic militarily that is the USS Pueblo had no airworthy aircraft to come to its rescue off of N Korea. That was the state of the US military all over the world - even in Europe.
And to maintain massive military operations (in Vietnam as in Iraq), the US economy was starved of necessary infrastructure, education, new product development, etc. The US even sold off the world's third largest industrial base - US owned foreign businesses - to pay for war. And as a result of that war, US military suffered for almost 10 years later.
Meanwhile, troops are not being trained for flexible military missions. They are spending time learning how to fight a war that has no hope of victory - that cannot end. Training for an internationally effective military? Of course not. Even standards for military recruits reduced just to meet recruiting quotas.
Degradation of military hardware. Helicopters now requiring something in excess of eight hours maintenance for one hour of flight. Air transports in degraded condition AND assembly lines for new transports closed. This is not what a healthy military looks like.
It is the lesson from Vietnam and the same symptoms apparently in today's overstretched US military. All signs of a military that is becoming increasingly threadbare each year. Deja vue Vietnam.
$400 billion annual budget to the DoD. Then another $100 billion quietly added later just for Iraq - just like during Vietnam. Money must grow on trees - when stagflation then resulted. Its not just the military that is being degraded.