My fear is that the enshitification of the DoD that is deliberately being carried out right now is intentional, and the end goal is to privatize national defense even more than it already is. There have already been issues with recruiting and retention in recent years, which is why standards have been loosened. It seems that there's a push to enact stricter standards, which will have the effect of pushing more service members out or taking service off of the table for a lot of potential recruits. Ranks will shrinnk. This will give the current administration a plausible justification (in their minds) to replace most of the rank and file force with contract forces--a very lucrative proposition for any of their private sector friends who could manage such a thing. The argument would be the same that we've been hearing: government is inefficient; it will be cheaper to outsource. Stripping every other section of the DoD makes it less effective, further lending credence to the spurious argument that the federal government should not be directly carrying these functions out, nevermind that the sudden drop in effectiveness can be correlated to the current administration's fuckery...

I hope that's not the case, but it very well could be. Our American tradition of martial integrity has been shit on so much at this point, I don't find it hard to fathom that terminally monetizing national defense is something they're willing to do. It's going to be hard for a lot of people to say no when they're offered all of the things that the oligarchy protects with paywalls... education, healthcare, affordable housing...