U.S. Military Strength Falls to Lowest Rating Ever Under Biden

The U.S. military in 2022, under the leadership of President Joe Biden, received its lowest ever rating this week in a newly released exhaustive analysis from the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of U.S. Military Strength assessed a wide range of areas, including threats to the U.S., the condition of the U.S. military, U.S. alliances, and more.

The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board noted that the assessment’s “weak” rating of the U.S. military was the first time it has ever received the score in the index’s nine-year history.

While the assessment found that the global operating environment from the U.S. perspective was largely favorable across the board, threats to the U.S. are rapidly increasing, with numerous nations posing a “high” threat against U.S. interests. The chief threats come from China and Russia, with Iran, North Korea, and others lagging behind.

In the portion of the assessment that focused on the power of the U.S. military, the analysis looked at capability, capacity, and readiness.

The assessment include the United States’ nuclear capability as a separate branch in the U.S. military because “of its truly unique characteristics and constituent elements, from the weapons themselves to the supporting infrastructure that is fundamentally different from the infrastructure that supports conventional capabilities.”

The assessment noted that the U.S. military is being degraded through “underinvestment, poor execution of modernization programs, and the negative effects of budget sequestration (cuts in funding) on readiness and capacity in spite of repeated efforts by Congress to provide relief from low budget ceilings imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

Skyrocketing inflation rates that were fueled by Biden’s agenda have led to greater expenses for the military, which erased progress made at the end of the Trump-era in increasing the U.S. military’s readiness.

The scores that were given out included “very weak,” “weak,” “marginal,” “strong,” and “very strong.”

Quick highlights from the assessment:

U.S. Army — “Marginal”

“The Army is aging faster than it is modernizing. It remains ‘weak’ in capacity with only 62 percent of the force it should have. However, 25 of its 31 Regular Army BCTs are at the highest state of readiness, thus earning a readiness score of ‘very strong’ and conveying the sense that the service knows what it needs to do to prepare for the next major conflict.”

U.S. Navy — “Weak”

“This worrisome score, a drop from ‘marginal’ assessed in the 2022 Index, is driven by problems in capacity (‘very weak’) and readiness (‘weak’). This Index assesses that the Navy needs a battle force of 400 manned ships to do what is expected of it today. The Navy’s current battle force fleet of 298 ships and intensified operational tempo combine to reveal a service that is much too small relative to its tasks.”

U.S. Air Force — “Very Weak”

“The Air Force has been downgraded once again, the second time in the past two years. The Air Force was assessed as ‘marginal’ in the 2021 Index but, with public reporting of the mission readiness and physical location of combat aircraft implying that it would have a difficult time responding