Taking a look at what people say : Ikkyu Sojun
The Western military is no longer a reliable fighting force. It is a cargo-cult ritual performed by men who still believe expensive choreography can substitute for the ability to kill and endure.
Generals mostly pretend to prepare for the next war in the same way priests recite ancient liturgies. They polish doctrines written for uncontested skies and polite opponents who agreed to die on schedule.
The result is a force exquisitely optimized for PowerPoint victories and completely unprepared for an enemy who simply refuses to cooperate with the script.
Ukraine exposed the fraud in real time.
Billions in “game-changing” systems arrived, performed their brief theater, and were ground down by mass, electronic warfare, and cheap attrition the West had declared obsolete.
The Red Sea added the punchline of the most expensive navy in history reduced to frantic, magazine-emptying defense against the military equivalent of bottle rockets.
Aircraft carriers were once the floating cathedrals of American power now function as the world’s most expensive hostages, sailing inside missile envelopes their defenders cannot reliably close.
Yet the propaganda machine never misses a beat. Destroy a civilian warehouse, a transformer station, a grain silo, and the spokesmen speak of “strategic effects.”
Only a civilization that has replaced military judgment with GDP accounting could mistake the demolition of civilian infrastructure for the destruction of an army’s will or capacity.
It is expensive vandalism performed by people too risk-averse, too careerist, and too conceptually bankrupt to close with a real opponent.
How weak does a power have to become before its primary output is narrative rather than decision?
The relics still look impressive in the parade but perhaps not even then.
On the actual battlefield they increasingly resemble museum pieces!