'The U.S and Marines are weak' - States new Report

File:MARSOC are shooting with M4 at Washoe Coutny Reginal Shooting Facility.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

According to a report made on National Interest Blog, the US and the Marines have been declared 'Weak' as the military posture of the US has been rated to be marginal. And that worries the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says The Heritage Foundation in a report.

The nation has “not been resourcing our military commensurate with what we ask our military to do,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said at an event Thursday marking release of the report from the leading conservative think tank.

“And maybe more disturhbingly, we have not been resourcing our military commensurate with our moral obligation to support the men and women who are risking their lives for us,” Thornberry said.

Dakota Wood, a senior defense fellow at Heritage who edited the 2018 Index of U.S. Military Strength, said the state of the military inherited by President Donald Trump is “too old.”

“Almost all the people I talk with … in terms of thinking about national security and foreign affairs [are] largely in agreement that the military we have is too small, it is too old,” Wood said.

The military is old both “in terms of the systems that it has, most of which were introduced in the 1970s and ’80s,” Wood said, and because “the readiness that we have seen over the several years has been in dramatic decline, given the sorts of things we want the military to accomplish around the world.”

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The report is the fourth such annual index completed by Heritage’s defense and national security scholars to measure the capacity, capability, and readiness of the U.S. military considering potential dangers abroad.

The new edition ranks threats to U.S. interests from terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Afghanistan as “high,” as it does threats from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

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The index rates the U.S. military presence as a whole as “marginal” while rating the conditions of both the Army and Marines as “weak” and the Navy and Air Force as “marginal.”  

“It is absolutely wrong at every level for the country to ask someone to go perform a mission for which they are not fully trained, fully prepared, and fully supported,” Thornberry said in his remarks. “And yet, we have not been meeting our obligations to them.”

The U.S. military presence abroad also has decreased.

In 1953, the military had about 450,000 troops in Europe, deployed to more than 1,200 sites. Today, about 62,000 troops are in Europe, what the index calls “an 85 percent decrease in personnel and 75 percent reduction in basing from the height of the Cold War.”

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