A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
The cope “muh budget” is batshit insane. The US is a dictatorship and the military budget has always gone up without needing subterfuge. Why now, that there’s a military police rounding up people in the streets randomly? Truth is, China has the manpower and tech not to fear the US, and also the natural resources…
America has long wasted tons of its military budget in things with tiny or even no Return On Investment in terms of additional effectiveness for every extra dollar spent.
In a sense the greatest enemy of the US is itself, in the form of the MIL and Corruption from the lowest levels to the highest.
I mean, notice the recent change in the budget for the military which this year removed the Right To Repair for the Military, something which does nothing other than hinder Military effectiveness whilst further enriching military hardware suppliers.
The way the money is misused and redirected to feather the nests of large military companies’ shareholders and CxOs, as well retired Procurement Generals who move to cushy jobs in the very companies they bought overpriced items from and MIL-friendly politicians in subcommittees approving white elephant military projects, is sort of a twisted mirror version of what happened in Russia were everybody in positions of power was on the take and their military when finally faced with a proper adversary at the same technological level - in the form of Ukraine - turned out to be a lot less than it seemed on paper.
Also America went down a route similar to Germany in WWII when they went for tanks like the Tiger Panzer which were peak-tech and very costly to manufacture, which the Allies countered by just throwing lots and lots of not-quite-as-perfect yet much cheaper and faster to manufacture tanks like the Sherman at it.
America has the biggest military budget in the World by a large margin, but also outright wastes a huge fraction of it and pays top premium for small incremental improvements, so the results aren’t as impressive as one would expect from just looking at money spent.
If you want to see efficient use of a military budget, look at Ukraine.
The US seems the only vountry with more corruption in military procurement than China.
Russia had whole warehouses in its inventory that only existed on paper. When they started their war they quickly found out.