Will Thibeau, U.S. Army Ranger veteran and director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, said America’s military is falling dangerously behind its adversaries on every front that matters from cheap battlefield drones and hypersonic missiles to physical fitness standards gutted by DEI ideology, and warned that the window to fix it before a major conflict is closing fast.
“For the cost of one Gerald R. Ford-class super carrier, about $13 billion, the military could buy 600,000 cheap one-way drones,” Thibeau said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “What aircraft carriers did to battleships in the Second World War, drones could potentially do to aircraft carriers in the Third World War.”
FPV drones now account for between 70 and 80 percent of daily combat losses on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia war, with an estimated 10,000 drones deployed per day across the battlefield, according to Army Technology.
Thibeau said America has the battlefield algebra completely backwards, spending millions to shoot down cheap enemy weapons while adversaries exploit that imbalance.
“How do you destroy expensive assets of the enemy with cheap things of your own?” he said. “We have that backwards. The Houthis were firing five to 10,000 missiles at commercial ships and sometimes our own destroyers, and we were shooting them down with even the cheapest $250 to $400,000 missiles.”
Pentagon war games simulating a conflict with China over Taiwan found the U.S. fired approximately 90 percent of its air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles and 80 percent of its long-range land-attack weapons in less than one week of fighting, according to Foreign Policy.
Thibeau said Ukraine’s destruction of the Russian Black Sea fleet with a handful of cheap autonomous watercraft represents one of the most significant shifts in military history.
“Ukraine more or less scuttled the Russian Black Sea fleet with explosive-laden autonomous jet skis, maybe a few dozen of them,” he said. “That is a paradigm shift in maritime power and it’s one that the United States needs to rapidly adopt.”
Thibeau said the most optimistic war game scenario for a US victory over China in a Taiwan conflict should give Americans serious pause.
“There’s a war game that CSIS released where they claimed a United States victory over Taiwan,” he said. “When you actually read the war game, though, it was a victory that involved 15,000 dead American service members, an aircraft carrier at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”
Thibeau said the military’s DEI-driven double standard on physical fitness testing exposed a dangerous cultural rot that goes far beyond politics.
“During the Biden administration, a woman would have to get 42 push-ups on the Army Fitness Test to get an A+,” he said. “A man would have to get 84 push-ups to get an A+. This is as much a cultural signifier of decay as anything else.”
Thibeau said the Obama administration ignored its own evidence when it removed the combat exclusion policy for women despite overwhelming data showing integrated units performed worse.
“Almost across the board, sex-segregated combat units outperformed sex-integrated combat units,” he said. “Nonetheless, the Obama administration still removed the combat exclusion policy against all available evidence.”
A 2015 Marine Corps study found that all-male infantry units outperformed mixed-gender units in 69 percent of combat task categories including marksmanship, casualty evacuation, and speed of movement, yet the Obama administration removed the combat exclusion policy the following year, according to the Rand Corporation.
Thibeau said DEI has become so deeply embedded in military institutions that changing political leadership alone will not be enough to root it out.
“West Point had a diversity and inclusion studies degree until January 19th of 2025,” he said. “This has become an institutional sickness that must be eradicated.”
Thibeau is director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, a project dedicated to exposing and eliminating woke ideology from the personnel, programs, and policies of the U.S. military. A U.S. Army Ranger veteran, he is a leading voice for restoring military readiness and combat effectiveness.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
