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America's National Security Wonderland

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor military leadership have been able to solve...

The Japanese imagined themselves using the tyranny of distance to draw America into one or several confrontations in the mold of the battle of Tsushima, after which the American public or its military planners would hopefully conclude that a protracted war in the Pacific simply wasn’t worth it, resulting in a negotiated settlement where both sides recognized the other’s sphere of influence. The constant churn of deployments, exercises, and endless maintenance is rapidly wearing down both the vehicles and men inside units like the 66th Armor Regiment: this is not just a problem of growing malaise and bitterness among the soldiers, but one that has real implications for current and future Army retention. What fewer people picked up on, however, was that the mission was doomed to fail from the start, purely due to technical reasons: the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (jlots) system being put in place was simply not rated to handle the regular sea states in the area.

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