This morning FOX News ran a report about the alarming state of readiness in Marine aircraft, along with their requisite “military expert” commentary from General Jack Keane. The US Armed Forces has been in an endless state of war since 2001, so this dire readiness state rests as a natural outcome. Some truths hold true for eternity and one of those truths comes from Sun Tzu, in the chapter on Waging War:
2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
Everyone in Congress who sits on Armed Services committees and the White House staff, who receive Armed Forces readiness reports, should have been well aware of these looming problems for the last decade. This isn’t just some “new problem” blowing up out of the wild blue yonder; it’s the predictable outcome of more than a decade of protracted war, then compounded by President Obama’s deliberate and willful undercutting defense readiness. When you have an administration more concerned about social engineering than warfighting capability, this decline in military readiness rests as the outcome – the Obama administration deliberately has made decisions designed to weaken the US military – that’s the truth. Now, lacking an ability to prove their “motives”, the Obama chorus will recoil in outrage and insist the President cares about military readiness and national security, so let’s just say the outcome of 8 years of Obama military policy has led to a collapse of American power projection globally and the next administration inherits a US Armed Forces besieged with readiness issues that must be addressed immediately.
libertybelle diaries 
As you say, this is no surprise to those of us who pay attention to military readiness. Our weapons and equipment are worn out. So are our troops. Morale, as this Administration hoist the Rainbow Flag and use the military as a social engineering testbed, is as low as it was just after Vietnam. Good people are being “pink-slipped” and even more not on the “cut lists” are voluntarily bailing out, having read the handwriting on the walls. All of this is a recipe for disaster. Look for a major military confrontation between now and January 20th, 2017.
Thanks for your comment Kinnison. I hope your prediction turns out wrong, but you’re reading the signs correctly. Scary times ahead.
“When you have an administration more concerned about social engineering than warfighting capability, this decline in military readiness rests as the outcome[.]”
On a related note I happened to hear another report on Fox – it got me to thinking, “I think I saw something on how this might be about to turn out. Now where did I happen upon it?”
Oh yeah, LibertyBelle’s sidebar!
http://www.martin-van-creveld.com/?p=602
JK, Thanks for mentioning that link. Mr. van Creveld has written about the social engineering in militaries around the world, for years. He covered all the innate, biological pitfalls in a book on women in combat several years ago. There was this bizarre video on National Review and it sums up the delusional mindset at work, better than I ever could: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/434158/watch-college-kids-cant-explain-why-short-white-man-isnt-tall-asian-woman