A RAND report that was published in July has been the subject of some debate recently due to its admission that leading Western militaries are woefully underprepared in the event of an actual conflict. The report’s findings “are stark, an unrelentingly bleak analysis of every aspect of the Empire’s bloated, decaying global war machine,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote in a scathing review of the report posted on Oct. 29. “In brief, the U.S. is ‘not prepared’ in any meaningful way for serious ‘competition’ with its major adversaries—and vulnerable or even significantly outmatched in every sphere of warfare.”
“The Pentagon’s comprehension of the economic, military, and political threats to ‘U.S. interests’ posed by China and Russia, and the pair’s emergent, world-defining partnership—to the extent they were even acknowledged at all—is found to be hazardously defective, if not non-existent,” Klippenstein writes. “And the [2022 National Defense Strategy’s] proposals for overcoming these issues, and maintaining the Empire’s worldwide dominance, are judged to be at best woefully inadequate, at worst outright delusional.”
Klippenstein compares the current situation to the final stages of the Soviet Union’s Glasnost period, and speculates at the end that “the fatal ‘disconnect’ between Pentagon operational and industrial planning identified by RAND will endure, and with it ever-intensifying U.S. military impotence. We’re spectating the Empire’s final acts in real-time.”
