US military entering a time of max vulnerability...

 via Washington Examiner

Washington Examiner: You were invited by the Heritage Foundation to preside over the release of its Index of U.S. Military Strength , which rates the readiness of the U.S. Army as “marginal,” the Navy and Space Force as “weak,” and the Air Force as “very weak” — the lowest grades in the nine-year history of the highly respected index. Only the Marine Corps, in which you served, and U.S. nuclear forces were rated “strong." What’s going on?

Rep. Mike Gallagher: I think it's a confluence of a few things. One, notwithstanding an infusion of dollars during the Trump administration to fix some readiness gaps, we've cut the military at a time when threats are increasing. Every budget proposed by recent presidents has amounted to a real term cut, at least the initial budgets [and that's what] the Biden budget was.

Two, we have the rise of China. We haven't really seen anything like we've seen with the massive military investment that China is making in its military. And of course, this isn't just a military threat. It's an economic threat. It's an ideological threat. And it's a threat for which we were completely unprepared. We were incredibly complacent, and we deluded ourselves with a naive assumption that integrating them into the global economy would moderate their political and military behavior. But precisely the opposite happened. They grew more aggressive, they militarized the South and the East China Sea, and of course, they have designs on taking Taiwan.

The third thing is that, in particular under the Biden administration, but also under the Obama administration, we have adopted a set of naive utopian assumptions about how the world works that has allowed liberal presidents to attempt to justify defense cuts. This idea that we've somehow evolved beyond wars of territorial expansion, that bad men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have some allegiance to the rules-based international order. So, all of this conspires to downgrade hard power and elevate soft power, and that's a recipe for deterrence failures.

Here 

He nailed it.

But did you notice that his concern extends beyond the US military and ventures into our ECONOMIC, and IDEOLOGICAL vulnerability?

China is beating us on every front that matters.

Sorry to venture again into politics but we are CULTRUALLY weak. Our MORAL fiber is weak.  We are NOT united on anything except a huge majority wanting NO responsibility  for shouldering their load!

Economically we did everything possible to destroy our own economy and now we're destroying our energy independence HOPING for a technological revolution that will render fossil fuels obsolete.

In essence we're getting beat on every metric that counts.  Pumping out what would once be considered B-films does not represent a strong culture.  Bowing to dreamers of a utopian future does not make that future happen.

And now its infected our military.