The US army is the worst army in the world. They're the only army that aspires to worldwide dominance, and they suck at it. It's the only Empire based on losing every war and looting its own treasury. Losing the last war is always covered up by the starting the next war, but if you look at it historically, America has been losing it for decades now. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, these are all losses or draws. Today, America can no longer field its own army, its Navy cannot secure shipping lines, its proxies cannot stand on their own, and its military assets are aging liabilities. The military-industrial beast that Eisenhower birthed now slouches towards Bethlehem to die. Things fall apart, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, et cetera.

America still has the highest military spending in the world, but this is like a boxer showing up at weigh-in riddled with tumors. That's cancer bro, not muscle. The US military budget is a measure of corruption, not competence. Pound for pound, the American military is weaker than it's ever been. It spends more to suck even harder. As war criminal Dan Grazier said in Responsible Statecraft, the Death Star is in a Death Spiral,

The Death Spiral is one of the main Pentagon Pathologies. The American people devote ever greater resources to their defense [sic] while receiving less and less in return. The Air Force had 10,387 aircraft in 1975 when the Military Reformers began their work in earnest. Today the Air Force has 5,288. The Navy had 559 active ships in 1975. Today the fleet has only 296. The Pentagon’s base budget is more than 60% higher today than it was in 1975, when adjusted for inflation.

Declining Marginal Returns

This is a simple illustration of what anthropologist Joseph Tainter called declining marginal returns. This phenomenon is obvious to any meditator, drug taker, or anyone that listens to a song for too long. Eventually, you get less bang for the buck. Everything that claims existence must lose it, this is the eternal law. This phenomenon applies to civilians as well as civilizations. It's akin to the physical law of entropy, the direction of time's arrow. Tainter graphed and explained the phenomenon in civilizations as follows,

In many crucial spheres, continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits for such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. Thus, not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return.

US Military Returns

There is no better example of this than the US military. You could pick any weapons program, but let's go with the F-35, the most expensive weapons program ever. This wunderwaffen cost $1.7 trillion and rising, has delivered less than 500 units, doesn't work half the time, and doesn't even come with a proper manual. I shit you not, these are all facts out of a 2023 GAO report (GAO-23-105341). Investigating the F-35s miserable readiness rate, the vestigial Government Accountability Office reported that,

Officials at both depot locations we visited said that the lack of technical data and incomplete technical data has delayed depot repair times. For example, according to officials from one depot we visited, components needing repair come with a Depot Component Maintenance Manual. However, these manuals are ambiguous and rarely are detailed enough for depot personnel to make the repair. As a result, depot personnel not only cannot fix the part, but they cannot learn and understand how to fix the part.

Why is the US military not able to maintain its own stuff? Because “program officials said manufacturers are unwilling to pass proprietary information through the prime contractor to DOD as they may expose information that may reduce their competitiveness as a private sector entity.” So because of this, they can't fix their own planes or debug their own software. They don't have the manuals or the source code. The US government has paid for a military program it does not own. The F-35 is just another enshittified subscription service, like Netflix for fighter jets. It also doesn't work half the time, and kills children when it does.

The F-35 is also an old program (from 2006) and completely unadapted to modern warfare. The F-35 is not that stealthy anymore, and is completely vulnerable to cheap missiles on the ground. As another war criminal, Frank McKenzie, said in another report, “An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun.”

This pathology is present across the whole US military. They get less bang for more buck across all technologies and personnel. They keep producing new technologies which are more complicated, more expensive, slower to (bomb a) market, and don't really work. The US advertises its high military budget as an asset, but it's really a measure of liabilities.

As Tainter said, “higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return.” Tainter's graph shows that, at some point, the return actually becomes negative. For the US military industrial complex, that moment was decades ago. As Colonel Everest E. Riccioni wrote in 2001,

In 1969, Pierre M. Sprey, a member of Program Analysis and Evaluation, acting in his formal advisory role for the Department of Defense, gave a presentation to an audience of 30 generals, admirals, and high-ranking civilian DoD executives. He concluded his review by accusing them of "opting for unilateral disarmament by purchasing military weapons at unprecedented and prohibitive prices resulting in too few weapons to win our wars." In addition, he noted that the complexity of the arms (which drove up costs) was a dominant factor ensuring failure of the weapons to meet their specified battle requirements.

You can pick examples of declining marginal returns from anywhere, Riccioni mentions aircraft missiles (again, from 2001). He said,

The cost of a firing (a burst or a launch) went from hundreds of dollars for guns, to $15,000 for an AIM-9B/D, to $90,000 for the AIM-4, to $190,000 for an AIM-713, to a dizzying $1.9 million for the Phoenix. Taking effectiveness into account, the cost of expendables alone make the cost of a kill about $5,000 for the cannon (guns), $100,000 for the Sidewinder missile (AIM-9), $900,000 for the Falcon (AIM-4), $1.9 million for the Sparrow (AIM-7), and quasi-infinity for the Phoenix. Clearly we cannot afford an air war, perhaps not even a single kill, with the Phoenix.

As all these retired generals, colonels, and accountability officers tell no one in particular, this isn't sustainable, who care? There's a lot of money in selling $50,000 toilet seats and million dollar bullets and none in these reports and blog posts. The economic incentives are completely misaligned with any military objectives. The whole structure of the American military industrial complex is a Ponzi scheme, not a real procurement program. And there's only one way this ends. Collapse.

Money Printer Go Brrrrr

America has, however, given declining shits because money printer go brrrrr and covers up their fundamental fragility. While America can theoretically keep printing money forever, at some point, psychologically, it becomes untenable. The US already has high debt to GDP ratios and its interest payments are already higher than military spending. This would be considered ruinous for normal countries but it's considered fine by most people because it's considered fine by enough people. This is a circular logic which is, in fact, a death spiral, getting smaller and smaller with each turn of the screw.

As a recent RAND report said, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of great power conflict.” America can keep 'printing' money but they can't print bullets. Instead, they keep increasing military budgets and decreasing military production. More and more money is chasing less and less goods, a textbook definition of inflation. And this inflation has spread throughout their declining civilization. America has politicized the definition of inflation, but if you look at what people actually spend the most on—homes, healthcare, education—inflation has already ruined their civilization.

To return to just military ruin, Grazier says,

Left unchecked, the acquisition Death Spiral’s inevitable destination is unilateral disarmament. Norman Augustine, a former DoD official and Lockheed Martin CEO predicted in 1983, with only a hint of satire, that by 2054, “the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”

What the few US military analysts that aren't up their own ass don't get is not merely that they shouldn't preserve their military. It's that they cannot. They are not the first civilization to face the death spiral. Everything that claims existence must lose it. Everything that lives must die. Nations are no different, and aggravations like America only spiral faster as they struggle.

It's not just that America spends more to get a more complex and less effective military. Declining marginal returns are common across many spheres of American civilization, cars, houses, trains, education, cinema, politicians. They can no longer build roads, subways, ships, or manufacture anything competitively. Everything is much more expensive and somehow much more shit. Declining marginal returns are real, and it couldn't come to a worse civilization than this one. I'd say good riddance if they weren't taking so many lives and a livable planet with them. So I'll just say God damn America. They can't spiral fast enough.