A little over a week ago, the Heritage Foundation issued a report that did not get the attention it deserves. The report is entitled “2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength,” and it details how significantly the U.S. military has declined under the not-so-tender care of the leftists in charge of the White House and the Pentagon. Indeed, if one considers China to be our greatest geopolitical foe, it’s questionable whether our military has the ability to fight, let alone win.

The 2023 Index has an executive summary that pretty much says it all:

As currently postured, the U.S. military is at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests. It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.

The summary explains that “The condition of America’s military power is measured in terms of its capability or modernity, capacity for operations, and readiness to handle assigned missions.” These metrics are measured against specific military objectives: defending American soil, successfully concluding a major war that poses a serious threat to America, and preserving “freedom of movement within the global commons (the sea, air, outer space, and cyberspace domains) through which the world conducts its business.” Except for the Marines, which have managed to resist the Pentagon’s “woke” obsessions, every one of America’s forces is in increasingly dire straits.

The threats are those you would expect: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other bad actors. What’s depressing is the grades assigned to the various branches of the military.

Image: The Naval Weapons Station Yorktown and Cheatham Annex celebrates Pride Month (2019, before Biden’s obsession with LGBTQ issues). Twitter screen grab.

The Army’s status is described as “marginal.” Its systems are not being modernized, it has just 62% of the troops it requires, and only 25 out of 31 of its “brigade combat teams” are technically “ready,” while it remains an open question whether they’re actually capable of performing.

The Navy is in worse shape than the Army, coming in at “weak.” While the report sees 400 manned ships as the minimum necessary, the Navy has only 298 ships, with a predicted loss of 18 more over the next 15 years. Moreover, I can say from the many years I belonged to the Navy League and paid attention to the ships, that the Obama administration’s focus was on new ships being “green,” rather than being maximally effective. I doubt that focus has shifted under Biden. I suspect the Navy brass have, instead, doubled down.

The Air Force, which once helped us control the skies, is “very weak.” It’s doing a terrible job of training and retaining pilots (and just think how many were forced out over the vaccine) and is missing 650 pilots from what would be a full force. The fighter aircraft fleet is, on average 32 years old. When you think how quickly planes went from the drawing board to the air during WWII, this is an appalling example of government inefficiency and the high cost of inevitable graft. The report says that the Air Force might win against some tin-pot little country but almost certainly cannot compete against a country with a first-rate military force.

The Space Force is weak because no one in the Pentagon or Congress seems to have been making any effort to turn it into a legitimate defense/fighting force.

Our Nuclear capabilities are failing. Again, this is because no one in Washington, especially Democrats, has any interest in keeping these weapons systems viable. The Chinese and Russians, though, are very interested in and supportive of their nuclear weapons capabilities.

The Marines, as noted, remain “strong.”

The bottom line is that Trump, debilitated by the Russia hoax from the moment he came into office, was unable to turn around the military that Obama had already degraded. And now, Biden has further degraded the U.S. military, openly making clear that his primary focus as commander-in-chief is creating racial strife, elevating transgenderism and the LGBTQ agenda, and being “green.” No wonder enlistment is down. Sane men and women know that this is a military that, rather than winning, will get them killed.

The only (very small) consolation I had reading the summary was that, while the Chinese build things, they don’t build them well. If their military weapons work as well as the things they send to Home Depot and Walmart, their military may be a bit of a paper dragon. That, however, does not make up for what the leftists have done to America’s frontline defenders.