America’s Military Challenge

Many young Americans no longer wished to serve in the military under Obama and Biden but do under President Trump. Why was this? First is the restrictive nature of recruiting. This includes disqualifications based on tattoos, past use of drugs, obesity, CRT/DEI, mandatory With less than 1% of the population serving, there was also a disconnect between civilians and soldiers, made worse by foreign, unnecessary wars in less significant places that dragged on for decades only to end in chaos or defeat. Gallup reports that public confidence in the military has fallen since the ’90s. Among Republicans, traditionally known as staunch supporters of the military, confidence has dropped from 91% to 68% in the last three years. Even veterans don’t want their kids to serve. This sudden slide is unsurprising, given the defeat and retreat from Afghanistan.

What reforms were undertaken amid such a national humiliation? The Department of Defense mandated new experimental vaccines for all active military and began ejecting thousands who refused them. At the same time, the government unleashed social experimentation programs, forcing those with traditional beliefs about marriage and gender—the kind of people typically open to serving—to endure training designed to indoctrinate them into a particular political ideology and violate their freedom of conscience.

These counterproductive policies hurt both recruitment and retention. Some have even speculated that we could end up in a neo-feudal mercenary century, where competent yet disgruntled soldiers abandon their country to sell their services abroad to the highest bidder.

This was accompanied by a decrease in military spending to about half of what it was in the ’80s as a percentage of the federal budget. This has led to a weakening across the branches. The Navy and Air Force cannot update ships and aircraft, and the Army and Marines cannot maintain troop numbers. Military branches are missing their recruiting targets by the thousands, with the Army alone falling 15,000 recruits short. Everything is in short supply, from artillery shells to anti-submarine warfare systems to pilots. America’s military is thus shrinking amidst increasing national security threats and a new era of “great power conflict.”

Yet even if the political will could be mustered to address these problems, America’s recruiting crisis would remain. Americans have been habituated to serving their interests at the expense of the neighbor next door and their country. Our culture trains selfishness, which is damaging to our republic. Conscription would both undermine this selfishness and solve the recruiting problem.

Every military force in history that has successfully adapted to the changing character of war and the evolving threats it faced did so by sharply defining the threats. We must frame future security problems and highlight their military implications stating how Joint Combat Forces will operate and be deployed to win and return to home base. This document will drive the concept and strategy that, in turn, will drive adaptation of joint combat operations utilizing Lily Pad Launch and Strike Force operations. We do not possess a clear crystal ball but we do know that the United States must change its current view of war fighting to operate in conventional and unconventional environments in a victorious manner. Political Correctness, social engineering and passive action have no place in American strategy.

War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied. -Sun Tzu…

The Art of War, trans. and ed. by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford,1963), p. 63.

The nature of the human condition will guarantee that uncertainty, ambiguity, and surprise and will dominate the course of events. However carefully we think about the future; however, thorough our preparations; however coherent and thoughtful our concepts, training, and doctrine; we will be surprised. Even the wisest of statesmen have found their assumptions about the future confounded by reality. The eighteenth-century British leader, William Pitt, the Younger, declared in a speech before the House of Commons in February 1792:

Within a matter of months, Britain would become embroiled in a conflict that would last nearly a quarter of a century and would kill more Europeans than any other war in history up to that time. In the broadest sense, the Joint Operating Environment examines three questions:

• What future trends and conflicts are likely to affect the United States and the Joint Force now and over the next quarter century?

• How are these trends and disruptions likely to define the future contexts for joint combat operations?

• What are the implications of these trends and contexts for the Joint Force Operations?

By exploring these trends (now with Cyber-warfare and Space), contexts, and implications, the Joint Operating Environment provides a basis for thinking about the world over the next quarter century. Its purpose is not to predict, but to suggest ways leaders might think about the future. As war at its essence is a human endeavor, then it follows that one of the most effective ways to understand human nature is by a close consideration of history. As such, rather than futuristic vignettes, the Joint Operating Environment uses history as a principal way to gain insight into the future. The discussion begins with the enduring nature of war, the causes and consequences of change and surprises, and the role of Strategy. Our strategists now must consider five dimensions of warfare: air, ground, sea, cyber and space. A commitment must be made that the US will not accept or tolerate “endless wars”.

This is the unique contribution of the Joint Operating Environment to the broader discussion about the future. This document offers some questions about topics that may fall outside the traditional purview of studies, but that nonetheless has important implications for the future Joint Force. We will find ourselves caught off guard by changes in the political, economic, technological, strategic, and operational environments. We will find ourselves surprised by the creativity and capability of our adversaries. Our goal is to eliminate surprise through better intelligence. Our goal is, by a careful consideration of the future, to suggest the attributes of a joint force capable of adjusting with minimum difficulty when the surprise inevitably comes. The true test of military effectiveness in the past has been the ability of a force to diagnose the conditions it confronts and then quickly adapt. In the end, it will be our imagination and agility to envision and prepare for the future, and then to adapt quickly to surprises, that will determine how the Joint Force will perform over the next twenty-five years. The ability to adapt to the reality of war, its political framework, and its technical and industrial modes, and to the fact that the enemy also consists of adaptive human beings, has been the key component in military effectiveness in the past and will continue to be so in the future.

The Nature of War - We can predict kinds of war and threats and we can only speculate or establish excellent intelligence about possible enemy/threat intentions and the weapons/terror that they will bring to the fight. We can state with certainty that the fundamental nature of war is changing. In a Republic such as the United States, political aims, pressures, and hesitations have always conceived military operations ………… and will continue to do so but we must have leaders with wisdom and vision. “When whole communities go to war... the reason always lies in some political or ideological agenda or economic situation.” Tyranny runs its course through history of other peoples and internal strife effecting unsettling conflicts. The US must be keenly aware now of domestic, treasonous entities as well as well as international threats. Civil war within the US looms as a possibility as our culture and politics seemingly divide the country.

War is an act when diplomacy fails or is a preemptive act by an enemy, begun for the most part for political and ideological purposes (e.g., Nazis, Communist, and Radical Islam). Indeed, both groups and specific transnational movements such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas use force and terror for political ends. Thus, war retains its political/ideological dimension in the twenty-first century, even when it originates in the actions of state, non-state and transnational groups. The Joint Force will operate in an international environment with no sanctuaries allowed where struggle and threat to US security exists. While the origins of war and conflict may rest on policy, a variety of factors has influenced the conduct of that struggle in the past and will do so in the future. The tension between rational political calculations of power on one hand and secular or religious ideologies on the other, combined with the impact of passion and chance, makes the trajectory of any conflict difficult if not impossible to predict. Rational strategy is often difficult in a world where organizational processes, bureaucratic politics, legislative restrictions, and economic conditions may dominate choices.

The Joint Force will face actors who view the world through different lenses than we do. In coming decades, Americans must struggle to resist judging the world as if it operated along the same principles and values that drive our own country. In many parts of the world, actors will judge costs and risk a differently than we do. Some of our enemies are eager to die for radical ideological, religious, or ethnic causes; enemies who ignore national borders and remain unbound by the conventions of the developed world – which leave little room for negotiations or compromise. Among these, we face irreconcilable enemies capable of mobilizing large numbers of young men and women, to intimidate civilian populations with IEDs, machetes or to act as suicide bombers in open markets. It becomes a matter of survival when human passion takes over.