The Western Military Isn’t Looking So Mighty Now. How many Ls Before It’s Ludicrous?

The United States and its proxy NATO have been losing wars and wrecking countries for decades now. As Sarah Miller says, “The US has essentially lost all the wars it has fought in the last 50 years, starting with Vietnam, ending with Afghanistan and, most would agree, including Iraq/Syria.” President Jimmy Carter said that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” (via Wade Davis). At some point if you wage all this war and you don’t win, you have to lose. You can only delay it for so long, and ‘so long’ is coming on strong.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin addressing recruits.

While the United States has the biggest military in the world, this is really a measure of how corrupt it is, not how good. The Pentagon is unauditable. They spend way too much for everything, and spend even more when it goes wrong. The current Defense (War) Secretary walked straight out of an arms dealership (Raytheon) and he’ll be back there when his tour of corruption is done. The United States Military is effectively privatized, as most dollars go to private contractors, certainly not grunts, and certainly not state production. The contracts are also effectively, monopolized. As imperial Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “In the 1990s, America had 51 major contractors bidding for defense work. Today, there are only five massive companies remaining.”

As Matt Stoller notes, quoting from a defense (war) finance contracting report:

Like middlemen in other industries, the big guys don’t really produce, they extract. The actual work, 60% to 70% of it, is performed by subcontractors, and these firms have very few rights and get paid when the big guys feel like it. The executives at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, in other words, act a lot more like financial engineers than actual engineers.

The net effect is the following: “Despite improving profit margins and cash generation for defense contractors in 2010–2019 vs 2000–2009, the share of contractor spending on Independent Research and Development (IR&D) and capital expenditures declined while cash paid to shareholders in dividends and share repurchases increased by 73%.”

For reference as to how fundamentally fraudulent this military-industrial complex is, look at the simple measure of shells (ie, really big bullets).

The United States can produce 14,000 shells per day, and will ramp it up to 85,000 in 2028. Russia produces nearly 20x that amount (250–350k per month). To produce its meager output shells the US requires imports of material like antimony from… China and Russia, the very people it’s trying to wage siege warfare on. The United States military is a shell game. It’s a con. This has been hidden because they’ve been attacking the poorest people on Earth (and losing), but now it’s being exposed because they’re trying to proxy fight a land war in Asia, and losing.

The US/NATO and its poor proxy Ukraine are losing their war with Russia. This is still somehow invisible in the western media, but just look at it through your eyes and not opinion columns. Whatever’s said and done, Russia is still in Ukraine, after all the noise and firepower deployed to kicking them out. This is an L, however you want to frame it. The White Empire (how I group the US/NATO/and the former colonizers and still colonized) has staked a lot of reputation on kicking Russia out, and they haven’t been kicked out. That means something. Coming off a loss to a completely unindustrialized ‘army’ in Afghanistan, losing in industrialized warfare to Russia must make the world question. What exactly is the US military good for?

Via Andrei Martyanov’s book, you have to ask these questions. Martyanov wrote: “As a longtime observer of Russian and American affairs, Patrick Armstrong, put it: “I can’t get two questions out of my mind: When was the last time the USA won a war? When was the last time US-trained troops fought effectively?” These are important questions. Really, what was the last war that the US won? Them and NATO have succeeded in destroying countries like Libya and Iraq, but are these victories? They tend to blow up in their face not shortly after. When was the last time US/NATO trained troops haven’t collapsed? Vietnam, Afghanistan, even Korea the best they got was their country divided in half. And now Ukraine, the largest army in Europe besides Russia, fruitlessly bashing their head into a wall.

If Empire is based on the perception of military might, who perceives America as mighty right now? They keep rolling out new hardware like toys in boxes of cereal (HIMARS! Patriot missiles! Abrams Tanks!) but then they all quite publicly fall apart. I understand that the deeply propagandized people within the core of the White Empire still believe that the next wunderwaffen will blow up the aliens, but most of the world isn’t so dumb.

America has been comprehensively shitting itself in public in regards to economic might, intellectual might, and basic competence for decades now, and this is in many ways the last straw. America may have been falling apart, stupid and depraved, but they could at least hit you. They could at least project power all over the world. Teddy Roosevelt said ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’, but now it’s the opposite. America spoke loudly about defeating ‘terror’ and lost, and now it’s framing an epic battle of ‘democracies™ vs authoritarians’ and losing that too. How many Ls can they take before it's ludicrous? How naked can their collapse be before people figure out that the Empire has no clothes. Take this as one finger pointing at their nudity. The American military and its proxy buddies do not look so mighty. It’s not even a cold day in Ukraine, and they look pretty small.