- The U.S. military is “weak” overall, according to Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength revealed Wednesday.
- All branches of the armed services, as well as U.S. nuclear and missile defense assets, are too old, too weak and too unready to deal with multiple major conflicts at once, Dakota Wood, Heritage’s senior research fellow for defense programs, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- “As currently postured, the U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to defend America’s vital national interests,” the report states.
(DCNF)—The U.S. military is already overstretched in responding to global threats and too weak to deal with the most pressing challenges to U.S. national security, according to a report released by a conservative think tank on Wednesday.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength functions as a report card for the progress of the U.S. military relative to the global operating environment and adversaries’ capabilities and rated the military overall as “weak,” editor and retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Dakota Wood told the Daily Caller News Foundation. In 2023, wars in Ukraine and Israel, compounded with the U.S. response to conflict exploding throughout the Middle East, put the U.S. military in a spotlight, demonstrating deficiencies in U.S. ammunition and weapons stockpiles and the ability to answer the president’s call to intervene simultaneously in more than one crisis.