It was more than the usual sky-is-falling rhetoric we’re used to seeing in national security reports out of Washington.
It came from some pretty sober, respected voices in the defence community.
A special commission report, presented to the U.S. Congress this week, delivered one of the most stark — even startling — assessments in the last two decades of the limits of American military power.
The independent, nonpartisan review of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defence Strategy said the U.S. could lose future wars with Russia or China.
“This Commission believes that America has reached the point of a full-blown national security crisis,” reads the 116-page document written by 12 leading defence and security experts and released Wednesday.
“If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency, or China in a war over Taiwan, Americans could face a decisive military defeat.”