Historians commonly refer to the twentieth century as the American Century, mostly due to the overwhelming might of the United States military and its ever-increasing potential to impact the global geopolitics of the day.

Prior to World War II, however, the U.S. was considered a regional power, with little political will to project itself militarily across the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans. Without that will, most observers deemed the U.S. too weak or too disinterested to match the rising Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, rallied Americans in a manner never before seen on the global stage. The result was the creation of the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine that history has ever witnessed.

When the Soviet Union—the only legitimate challenger to American hegemony—collapsed in December 1991 (following the Gulf War victory in Iraq), American leaders emphatically proclaimed the U.S. to be an indispensable nation. With the Cold War over, expectations were high that America would lead a movement to democratize the world, bringing peace, prosperity, and protection to every nation.

Three decades later, those once-lofty expectations are trembling precariously, wounded by the realities of careless and godless political leadership. The greatest military on earth today may still be American. However, with thirty years of shamefully slipshod and confusing management, frightening cracks in the armor have appeared, and few seem willing or capable of repairing them.

According to Dakota Wood, editor of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Military Strength:

Near the end of the Cold War, we had 770,000 soldiers in the active-duty Army. Today, we have less than 480,000. We had nearly 600 ships in the Navy; today, we have 290 and most of that stuff is very, very old. . . . [A]s a percentage of federal budget, [military spending is] at historic lows. . . . And as a share of our budget, military spending has dropped from 25% to 20% and now it’s only 15%.

Sadly, the same trends are confronting all four of the nation’s armed services. Precious and expensive military hardware, like fighter jets, submarines, troop transports, and tanks, are aging or need repair and replacement parts. These maintenance issues are becoming more difficult to resolve due to supply-chain problems and political conflicts with one of the primary sources of replacement parts, China.

Adding to the negative trends are recent reports from the Pentagon that show a 30% shortfall in recruiting goals for 2022. That translates to an insufficiency of tens of thousands of soldiers for 2023.

According to North Carolina Public Radio military reporter Jay Price, “Recruiters already had been fighting some long-term trends for decades. Rising obesity rates and other physical and mental issues have left just 23% of young Americans eligible to serve.” Price noted that the situation is worsening this year because “the number of potential recruits scoring well enough on the armed forces vocational aptitude test has fallen sharply, apparently because high school academics suffered during the first years of the pandemic.”

Beyond the depressing numbers, American political and military leaders are pressing for a greater emphasis on various LGBT-driven agendas. They express more concern for accepting and promoting “alternative” lifestyles among our fighting men and women than combat readiness. The Pentagon even pays for expensive and time-consuming gender-transition therapy and surgery for any active soldier who desires to change his or her sex. In addition, all armed forces members must undergo sensitivity training—including mandating the use of preferred pronouns—to “combat” the natural challenges to troop unity such policies introduce.

Further weakening our military’s readiness and resolve is the growing belief among political and military leadership that America’s greatest security threat is not from bad actors like China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran, not from terrorist groups or insurgencies, but climate change. In June 2021, during a speech to U.S. troops in England, Biden stated:

You know, when I went over in the Tank in the Pentagon, when I first was elected Vice President, with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were—the greatest physical threats. And this is not a joke: You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming.

That consensus is only strengthening today, with the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark A. Milley, concurring. The President has also been working openly with key European allies to form a unified approach to combating climate change, a major priority for his administration and, sadly, for our “fighting” forces.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, the Editorial Board published an article on November 4, 2022, titled “‘The Big One Is Coming’ and the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready,” which claimed

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America’s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public. So it is encouraging to hear a senior flag officer acknowledge the danger in a way that we hope is the start of a campaign to educate the American public.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said this week at a conference. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested” for “a long time.”

How bad is it? Well, the admiral said, “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.”

As America and her allies head into the frightful waters of the future, it appears they depend less on God and more on a ship that is “slowly sinking” to project power and influence around the globe. Without its once-vaunted military machine ready to deter any opposing aggression, the U.S. may soon be forced to acquiesce to Eastern powers in distressing and disconcerting ways as the world moves forward into what may become the Asian Century (see God’s curse in Leviticus 26:17-19).