The first cold war was fought with military hardware and we bankrupted the USSR. Now we find ourselves in a second cold war and the Chinese and they are using every trick in the book to bankrupt the USA and destroy the USA’s industrial base, with slave produced product, which is the heart of the USA’s strength. They are winning. A combination of corruption and stupidity will destroy the USA.
My military career started in the early 1980s. Back then, there was a lot of concern about the “Industrial base”. And rightly so. But it started to evaporate in the late 1980s (as the Soviet Union declined) and you hardly ever heard the phrase by the end of Clinton’s 2nd term. It is shortsighted, stupid and some day will come back to bit us in the ass. In fact, I can foresee a perfect storm of factors (inadequate industrial base, women in combat, political correctness, aging equipment, white elephants like the F-35, etc) taking their toll at the same time in a future conflict.
After Vietnam, we did some serious introspection and improved the Military. Sadly, I think it will take another defeat of that magnitude to wake us up again. But, at least, after Vietnam we still had common sense as a society. I fear we have lost that and will draw exactly the wrong conclusions next time. That is, instead of fixing the real problems, we’ll double down on stupid.