President-elect Donald Trump is taking over the "staggering challenge" of a military that is unprepared to fight America's enemies, conservative analyst Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post — and worse still, he has nominated a man to lead it who doesn't understand why.
This comes as Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has come under fire for his history of alleged sexual misconduct, heavy drinking, and advocacy to pardon war criminals — and it also comes as Trump refuses to rule out using military force to seize territories like Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone as part of a neo-imperialist project.
But the military is not even prepared to perform its basic defense duties right now, wrote Boot, let alone engage in wars of aggression and conquest.
"The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it," wrote Boot. "Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict."
ALSO READ: Trump intel advisor Devin Nunes still dismisses Russian election meddling as a 'hoax'
Hegseth has repeatedly claimed the military is failing to meet its recruitment goals due to "wokeness" and commitments to diversity alienating the type of masculine soldier stock America once relied on — but that completely misunderstands the issue, wrote Boot: the real problem "is that America became complacent after the Cold War when it downsized its armed forces and its defense-industrial base. Since then, the United States has prepared a military suitable for fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq — but utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power."
Today, Boot wrote, we're facing a military that has a degraded ability to construct and service its own ships, a massive shortage of drones, and a lack of infrastructure or institutional knowledge to fix these problems — and despite common complaints about how much money is spent on the military, "While high in absolute terms, U.S. defense spending is just 3 percent of gross domestic product, far below Cold War levels."
"Now it will be up to senators to decide if Hegseth — who was dogged by accusations of mismanagement and misconduct at the two nonprofits he ran — is the right person to rebuild America’s atrophied defense capabilities," Boot concluded. "The committee members should grill him not only about his past, but also about his plans to address this massive challenge. His record doesn’t inspire confidence that he can rise to a task that would severely test far more experienced executives."