The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a “hyperpower,” then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.

Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2 trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.

President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.

A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.

The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.

Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.

The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.

It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.

It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.

It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.

Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.

Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”

None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?

This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…

US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…

The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.

The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.

The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.

This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US........

© Common Dreams