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Like I've said before, system dysfunction doesn't exist in a vacuum, if the rot is visible in one area of government, it certainly exists elsewhere. The Pentagon is in the end nothing but another American government bureaucracy, one of the least accountable ones at that.
America's complete half-assed incompetent approach to dealing with the coronavirus, an actual actionable threat with 150k casualties, is going to be reprised in any actual shooting war where the enemy actually can fire back and not just take it from drones at 60k feet.
The Bonnehomme Richard fire just drove this lesson home for me recently. A LHD while under refit caught fire, a similar event had happened to a new 075 LHD in China, and that is where the similarities end. The dockyard fire was brought to control in under an hour in China and the
ship is soon set to start sea trials with work nearly complete. The fire aboard the Bonnehomme Richard raged for 5 days and completely gutted the ship, leading to a certain write off. The US Navy prides itself on professionalism yet the evidence is unequivocable. A spark in both
cases started a fire. The Chinese solved their problem, the American problem fixed itself by turning into a listing burnt out hulk. What the US Navy has now is not actually professionalism, but rather like everywhere else in the US government, a perverse managerialism tied to
checking off metrics on a list. It functions in relative peacetime with a veneer of adequacy because of inertia but will fall apart when stressed. Part of this is bureaucratic, but I suspect mostly the issue is that the US armed forces has turned into Austria-Hungary writ large.
Multi-ethnic armies, all things being equal, are simply less effective than monoethnic forces. The US armed forces, with it's particularly young age profile is on the vanguard of the US demographic transition and it's profile mirrors that of those under 18, a majority-minority.
