I Don't Do This By Throwing Darts At A Board While Blindfolded

Just one of 10,000 outrages in the past 25 years

From comments to the last piece:

"The rot of PC had already thoroughly infected the U.S. military by the time of Gulf War One; in order to predate the pernicious influence of Cultural Marxism (PC writ large)upon the armed forces, you have to go back before the advent of the much-vaunted but somewhat overrated "all-volunteer force" (AFV) during the mid-1970s.

The uncomfortable, inconvenient truth for those who think the current AVF structure is ideal, is that it has a very mixed record when it comes to winning wars. Moreover, the AVF has never been tested in combat against a peer opponent."

Sorry, but no, my time placement was accurate.
I was pointing the time of peak military capability, not to the last time there was some mythological ideological purity of thought, which has existed within the military never, and no place.
The point of choosing 1991 was that at that time, we hadn't yet started RIFing out entire squadrons and regiments.

And we had no peer nor even near-peer opponents, anywhere in the world.
Which was the entire point.

Iraq was the sixth-largest land army extant, and we completely rolled it up in 6 weeks of air campaign, and three days of ground combat. Its air force had completely ceased to exist.
Doing the same with #2 through #5 would merely have been an exercise in additional time and ordnance, at that point, had we been so inclined.

It also marks the last time the US military was used as a military, rather than as the Meals-On-Wheels Diversity Scout Patrol.
Nota bene how well it works when you use an axe as an axe, and not as a butter knife. Nor some perverted fetish sex toy.

It turns out the reverse of the former Soviet military philosophy is also true:
Quality has a quantity all its own.

And after that, we started ruthlessly culling men, equipment, and capability, of a type that could have taken on the pre-AVF military from anytime between 1946 and 1976, and stuffed it in a wastebasket with one hand tied behind its back.

The Navy peaked at 592 ships in 1989, but in 1991, we had 15 aircraft carriers.
Now we have 10.
In the late 1980s, we had 69 destroyers, 115 frigates, 102 attack submarines, and 39 ballistic missile subs on patrol.
We now have, respectively, 59, 29, 53, and 14.
We went from 592 ships at our peak, to 267, (+ 8 Little Crappy Ships that cannot do anything useful, and would be, in wartime, a liability, not an asset). USN Ship Strength, year by year

The last time it was as pathetic as it is now was from 1923-1930, and even then, bridge officers managed to not run into civilian shipping, as a general policy, and were qualified watch standers.

Yet we still have 271 admirals: virtually one per commissioned ship!?!
This is far beyond recockulous, and I'm betting we could fire 240-250 of those braid-heavy @$$holes with no loss, and probably a great improvement, in naval efficiency. Not to mention the savings in salary and pensions.

The Air Farce was slashed even more drastically. Like halved.

And the Army went from 3/4s of a million men to hovering at around 500K, most of that taken directly from frontline capability, going from 17 active duty divisions to 10, currently. We got rid of two armored and five infantry divisions. The entire US Army, in one place, would be a speed bump to an actual peer adversary, and we couldn't get the entire army to one place anywhere if we had to in less than a year, probably more like three, and only by stripping it from five other commitments which it cannot keep either, even at present.

Strategists have long recognized that we are trying to play "Twister" with an octopus, strategically. That won't end well.

(For reference, the entire active US Army, 10 divisions at present, is smaller than the 14-division Third Army that General Patton commanded, and used to break the siege during the Battle of the Bulge. We had more troops in Vietnam at the height of that conflict than the entire US Army has at present. Think about that.)

That would be bad enough, given that our overseas commitments since 1991 have doubled, rather than halved, but add on top of that the vigorous gaying and diversity-cornholing of the military, to the point that now transgenderism, instead of being a medical and psychological bar to enlistment, is actively encouraged, and the uniform lowering of all standards in all units for every metric that matters. (If you think Chelsea Bradley Manning's treason was an aberration, I have a bridge for sale, cheap.)

You have sailor-chicks who can't handle basic damage control tasks, which means you have 95-pound weaklings who can't pull a hose pack through confined spaces, or heft DC 4x4s into places to plug a hole in the hull.
That means ships will die.

The pregnancy rates and non-deployability of women on sea duty is legendary.
They are, in short, a disaster for the Navy. At least, if it was meant for combat.
Clearly, that's now a tertiary function.

You have Air Farce ground service troops who can't heft basic ordnance into place and plug it in by hand, even with 150-200% of the requisite male staffing for that function.
That effects manning levels required, aircraft turnaround, ability to operate at high tempo, and basic combat readiness.

In the ground combat arms, Army and Marines, you have the can't-cut-it Combat Barbies who're either going to be literally carried when war comes, or fragged in self defense, whether enlisted or officerettes. (And I'm cheering for the latter, if you're wondering.)

One fouled up Barbie can take out a platoon.
One fouled up platoon can screw up a company, a battalion, and a brigade, and undermine an entire operation.
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The first thing they need to do is expunge women from service outside of CONUS, or in any combat arm or position they are simply incapable of performing, under non-elastic standards from Before The Rot. That would be, by actual reality, about 99% of them.
Ditto for gays, although they, at least, can claim to meeting equal standards in times past, unlike any women in the service since 1865.

Let's be clear; the military's job is to kill people, and break things, as a team.
If you have any legal-historical evidence that women, gays, and the other 57 genders can do that better than the military did prior to their deliberate inclusion, or even as good, on the whole, bring it out. I'm open to rational discussion. But the military's fundamental purpose isn't and never should have been to "look like America". It was, and always should be, to make America's enemies look like blobs of festering chum. Anything that doesn't advance or improve that mission has to go, and that means 98% of the chicks and the queens should be gone, forever, and good riddance.

Including them has been a disastrous social experiment, that has chiefly proven that the derelict officer corps and careerist NCOs will fudge any rules and lower any standard, knowing full well that those rules and standards were written in the blood of earlier generations.

Anybody in the current military with stripes or brass is therefore complicit in getting future generations killed. If the boot fits, wear it.

It's like cops that look the other way when the criminal fraction within them go hog-wild: the blue wall of silence goes up, and they all become the problem, not the solution.

So just as an entire police department becomes a criminal gang, the entire military becomes a criminal conspiracy to defraud the nation and weaken the US' military capability, because no one will put their rank and career on the line to tell the obvious truth.

Total number of general (or any other rank) officers to resign over these lowered standards, to date: 0.
QED

Thus the honest and conscientious types get out, and/or refuse to go in, and the military's decline becomes a death-spiral. We are now decades into that terminal spin.

Nations have been at this crossroads before.
Like Rome, at the point when they stopped demanding citizens serve, and turned defense of the entity to foreign-born mercenaries.

The end that follows is not pretty.
And anyone espousing some magical return to pre-1900 isolationism, and/or cheering on the inevitably following Dark Ages is an ahistorical idiot, and a five-star jackass.

Our military is near-hopelessly broken. It would take woodshedding the abortion of which we've been gifted with a meat axe and a flamethrower, and throwing trainloads of money at it we don't have, because we gave it to giant banking cartels instead. We're beyond broke, we're 90 years in debt.
What cannot continue, will not. And the bill is going to come due, sooner or later.

That makes what comes next rather predictably horrible.
I yell because I care, but the patient is probably terminal at this point, and that's only the first-order effect.

You don't even want to think about the second-, third- and fourth-order effects to that inescapable reality.
But you'll see this material again, kids.