Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro broke down the five greatest challenges facing the U.S. military in the latest episode of his YouTube series “Facts.”
In the episode, which was released on Saturday, Shapiro said that the American military has been a great force for good in the decades following World War II, leading to global prosperity and the avoidance of World War III.
“The American military has been the guarantor of world peace since World War II. Despite talk of the evils of American militarism, the reality is that World War III has been prevented by American hegemony. No country would take on the United States directly, and no alliance could form sufficient to take on the United States and its allies directly. Furthermore, global prosperity is a direct result of American military predominance,” Shapiro said.
Yet despite the longtime dominance of the American military, the once widely trusted institution is facing five major challenges that could threaten the peace, Shapiro explains.
The first challenge facing the military is the global dependency of other nations, especially in Europe, on American military power. After World War II and during the Cold War, many nations became reliant on the U.S. for military support and stopped paying for their own defense.
“This bleeds our economy, which leads to domestic turmoil and increased calls for reducing America’s military budget. In reality, the Cold War mentality held by many of our Western allies, a mentality that says we ought to foot the bill for their defense needs, needs to end,” Shapiro said.
Second, Shapiro pointed out that the U.S. military was significantly underinvesting in naval power, which has allowed rivals like China to edge closer to the U.S. While the U.S. still has the strongest global naval presence, China has built the world’s largest naval fleet and the gap has only continued to narrow.
The third major challenge is technological problems, as Shapiro said that the U.S. advantage of technological superiority was “dissipating.” This technological stagnation has been in part triggered by a bureaucracy that incentivizes a reliance on older technologies.
Fourth, the military is experiencing recruitment problems, an issue to blame in part on an increasingly ineligible pool of young people who are too unhealthy to join and an alienation of conservatives who have traditionally been more predisposed to join the military.
The final problem detailed by Shapiro is the decline of public trust in the military, which has been caused in part by disastrous decisions like the withdrawal from Afghanistan and woke policies perpetrated by figures like former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.
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Shapiro concluded the episode by cautioning against allowing a hostile power like China to fill in a gap of American leadership abroad.
“All of this means that an America able to muscularly defend our interests is in the best interests of both Americans and people across the world. But in order for that to happen, Americans have to decide to support their military, and the military has to justify those expectations,” he said.
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