So much of the military budget is just funneling money to contractors as opposed to actually getting results. The F-35 is a joke. The last time the US military was actually tested by a strong opponent was in Vietnam, and was now 50 years ago. And the US lost that one. I'm wondering, if there was a conventional, non-nuclear war with say China in a few more years, is it possible we'd see the shocking result of the US military getting absolutely embarrassed. I mean, it's obvious I think that the US wouldn't win that anyway, but I'm talking about like, the world realizing all the trillions spent on the vaunted US military didn't really mean much and other than the nukes, the US is actually militarily weak?
Yeah I can relate to that. My experience with U.S armed forces is that a lot of the training, equipment, and mentality is geared towards fighting asymmetrical warfare with as little human contact as possible to limit u.s casualties, meaning heavy emphasis on mechanized combat, intra-arms communication between forward-observers and rear force multiplier support groups, and maintaining numeric superiority to increase operation success.
The U.S army as a whole does still practice fighting against near-peer armed forces, as we see from the numerous war games they hold on the borders of other "rogue" states, yet those are simply yearly dress rehearsals and not active combat-prep exercises. The majority of the training time a lot of the army battalions spend is spent on going over the lessons it's learned over the 20 years in the Iraq/Afghanistan occupations - which puts it at a strategic disadvantage when it comes to fighting near-peer or peer armed forces designed to specifically counter it.