So much of the military budget is just funneling money to contractors as opposed to actually getting results. The F-35 is a joke. The last time the US military was actually tested by a strong opponent was in Vietnam, and was now 50 years ago. And the US lost that one. I'm wondering, if there was a conventional, non-nuclear war with say China in a few more years, is it possible we'd see the shocking result of the US military getting absolutely embarrassed. I mean, it's obvious I think that the US wouldn't win that anyway, but I'm talking about like, the world realizing all the trillions spent on the vaunted US military didn't really mean much and other than the nukes, the US is actually militarily weak?
I know when a section of my reserve peers went to America for an exercise there was an exorbitant set for it, there was rigged explosives, rockets on lines, people reenacting their injuries they probably got on the job (which was probably the most fucked thing tbh), it was like a Hollywood movie. Our section was to be the bad guy against a few full battalions occupying what was basically a full town. By going one building at a time our section almost routed their forces. It was pretty funny, they ended the ex and our section commander was brought into basically a movie theatre filled with your officers and generals as they rewatched the scene and talked about what they did wrong and how one competent section managed to beat several battalions. This happens enough that I feel comfortable it won't DOX me but I will say when they ran the situation again they used their referee to cheat.
Thats my anecdotal experience with the American military. I still think my favourite effort post about it is this one, including the comments. There is a recently released sailor in the comments there who brings up some real interesting points I would reccomend giving a read.
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That was our experience there basically lol. If they could call in airstrikes I imagine we wouldn't have done too well by nature of being a normal section with normal section level equipment. I imagine their opening gambit and long-term strategy would rely upon air support heavily if they ever had the gall to invade a country with a functional military. It would have to because the rest of their troops are so bad.
You can look at what was done to Iraq in 1991 to get an idea of the US military's idea of opening moves.
See also Korea and the crazy amount of bombs being dropped there. Same with Vietnam. The US is an air based military force.
Yeah I can relate to that. My experience with U.S armed forces is that a lot of the training, equipment, and mentality is geared towards fighting asymmetrical warfare with as little human contact as possible to limit u.s casualties, meaning heavy emphasis on mechanized combat, intra-arms communication between forward-observers and rear force multiplier support groups, and maintaining numeric superiority to increase operation success.
The U.S army as a whole does still practice fighting against near-peer armed forces, as we see from the numerous war games they hold on the borders of other "rogue" states, yet those are simply yearly dress rehearsals and not active combat-prep exercises. The majority of the training time a lot of the army battalions spend is spent on going over the lessons it's learned over the 20 years in the Iraq/Afghanistan occupations - which puts it at a strategic disadvantage when it comes to fighting near-peer or peer armed forces designed to specifically counter it.