Current year US military is hilarious

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn't go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn't an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn't had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can't fly when it's raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

Unfortunately none of the American cruise missiles are particularly long range or stealthy (there was a stealthy one, retired),  all are subsonic, and they have shorter ranges than the Russian gizmos, which also come in supersonic and hypersonic varieties. Rooskies also have newer generations of ballistic missiles, and are really good at shooting down cruise missiles, so there's that. Supposedly they also have nuclear tidal wave torpedoes capable of wiping out US coastal areas in radioactive sea water, SLAM hypersonic nuclear  ramjet cruise missiles and who knows what else. Pretty obvious who wins a nuclear war scenario: it won't be the US. I mean, nobody wins a nuclear war, but the days of US supremacy or even basic competence with maintaining nuclear forces are long over.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russians have figured out they can mass produce cheap drones with parts they scrounge from AliExpress and old washing machines and grind down Ukrainian forces that way.  There are supposedly effective defenses against them. Raytheon has some giant klystron thing you can fry consumer grade electronics with. It's not clear how well they work, but the US isn't going to find out because .... well I don't know why they don't manufacture and deploy the things. The Russians are a lot better at microwave technology than the US is, so I assume they have something that could also work in the same way, but as far as can be told in the fog of war, they haven't deployed yet either. Maybe they'd be giant HARM beacons or something. The US government seems to have lost interest in Ukraine in general; like a psychotic toddler who gets bored with a video game he's losing and flings it away.

Speaking again of submarine nuclear deterrence: the Russians have a decent fleet, with more modern types, some of which have capabilities unmatched by the US. The Chinese have a half dozen each attack and ballistic missile submarines as well, effectively the same as the US Los Angeles class (26 of which are still in service). They also have a really good anti-ship missile. Mostly though, if the Chinese want to destroy the US, they could simply stop shipping us stuff in return for T-bills. I assume they're for helping get Taiwan back or threatening the Indians. While the US has a dominant Navy, the concept of it is kind of inherently stuck in the early 20th century: it's to protect US world exports which no longer exist. Protecting US imports doesn't work if your trading partners are mad at you.

On the bright side, we have a chick as Chief of Naval Operations; so America's prime directive has been fulfilled. The ability to project power via a powerful navy is useful. The ability to sustain a war with the one we have is questionable though. Since the US shipped most of its manufacturing abroad, including the ability to manufacture things like warships, we'd be kind of screwed in that scenario. Just as the Ukranians are finding out, the ability to mass produce objects used in warfare is still pretty important, and the US is terrible at this. This despite all the futuristic solid printing computard nonsense the MIC and procurement is always babbling about lowering costs and increasing production.

The US Air Force is still the largest and most capable in the world. There are still lots of F-15s, and F-16s, and even though they're old enough some of them are falling apart, these are pretty important and a source of real physical power. The F-22 is pretty cool, but there are only around 150 of them, and afaik they're still suffocating pilots. One was recently used to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon.  F-35 also suffocates pilots, and there are considerably more of them, with considerably less utility beyond cost ineffective strafing of cavemen who don't seem overly troubled by this.  We  have Naval F-18s which are also pretty cool. Of course, like with the Navy, we should think about what all these jets are for. They could probably defeat Russia's air force. I won't ask to what end, because nothing done by the foreign policy goons makes sense any more; it's obvious we can't defeat them on land. China's air force would be considerably more difficult, as they'd have to get to China (the F35 wunderwaffe for example has short legs), and China has a lot of aircraft, many of them more advanced than our own.

As for the Army,  77% of military aged kids are ineligible because they're too fat, too mentally ill or too retarded. And the standards are considerably more lax than in yesteryear when the Army could still fight some semblance of a ground war without full air superiority. People who have their shit together enough to pass the Army's standards are mostly finding other things to do. Patriotism also isn't taught in schools much any more, and at this point, I actually agree with this: America is fucked up and whatever there was to be proud of is gone.  The Army are offering special benefits so more people train for the hellish duty of telling family members their soldier relations are dead, presumably because they're foreseeing lots of casualties in the next few years. People with long family military traditions are advising their sons to not enlist. The Army is considering reinstating the Draft. They're so desperate for qualified useful personnel they stopped making advertisements featuring lesbian mommies, and they're starting to make ads so lily white the Waffen SS would approve. There's talk of making girlbosses register for the draft; it almost got out of committee. Ominous signs for certain. I'd almost enjoy the spectacle of delusional American womanhood being forced to join the Army, except I like my young female relatives.

First female Captained Aircraft Carrier leaves port: this is a metaphor for something.

Most of the innovations in weapons systems of the last two decades have been abject failures; from Zumwalt and Littoral Combat Ships, to the F-35. Even more humble projects like the KC-46 tanker (a Boeing 767 to replace the KC-135 which are basically 50s era 707s) have had a hard time. There are no new wunderwaffen in waiting, and the manufacturing capabilities of the US probably aren't capable of building any if we were to come up with a good idea.

Bringing it back to the Minuteman failures, these failures are representative of the country in general. Our missiles don't work, but we sure do have fancy over produced websites about our missiles. The current goblins in charge inherited something which was functioning pretty well, looted it, let it rot, and expects it to continue to function because they think technology they see all around them is something that just happens naturally, like sunshine. I bet more people got promoted making this cool website than making the missiles work; Mandarinates are always more concerned with appearances than fact. Simple things like town infrastructure are rotten (outside the beltway which hilariously still has nice roads). Even the biological material of the nation is decaying: the people are ridiculously obese and mentally ill, and life expectancy is declining. Institutions which should be impartial are politicized, and politicians are more interested in controlling what people say on twitter and facebook than they are in fixing the roads or the nuclear missiles. Everyone hates each other and everything is fake, gay and falling apart. But there's a lot of stuff left for entropy to digest and dipshits tell us the economy is doing great, so nothing changes.

We just spent 20 years dropping expensive bombs on Afghans for wanting to be Afghans and live life their own way. In that period of time, their population doubled. Fertility rate of native born Americans (and allies), by contrast, is about half replacement rate. The people who fought the war with Afghanistan will be halved in population. That's the optimistic view, assuming the Russians don't nuke everyone in a fit of pique, and assuming we can convince some of the zoomers to fuck each other in the normal front-hole way. Dying America is still dangerous, like a lunatic who inherited his father's arsenal, but it sure ain't what it used to be.

I laugh along with Handsome Thursday Afghan chads

Edit add: Trident failed again. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68355395