A top Pentagon official resigned this week and warned that the United States is losing its edge in the global race for technological superiority.
Preston Dunlap, who had been the founding chief architect officer of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force since 2019, announced his resignation Monday in a lengthy LinkedIn note in which he urged the Department of Defense to stop being complacent.
Dunlap’s job was created during the tenure of former President Donald Trump, who established the Space Force in 2019 as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces.
In his letter detailing his playbook for fortifying national defense, he exhorted the United States to not “[l]ull ourselves into complacency, when we should be running on all cylinders.”
Dunlap also warned against defending “our turf, when we should be defending our country” and competing “with each other, when we should be competing with China.”
At one point, he blasted the Defense Department’s arcane bureaucracy, which he says inhibits innovation and stifles progress.
Dunlap recalled how on his first day at work, “I arrived to find no budget, no authority, no alignment of vision, no people, no computers, no networks, a leaky ceiling, even a broken curtain.”
He added: “Ironically as I’m writing this, I received notification that the phone lines are down at the Pentagon IT help desk. Phone lines are down? It’s 2022, folks.”
Let this sink in: Three days ago, the phone lines were down at the Pentagon — the command post for U.S. national defense.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden just signed legislation to send an additional $13.6 billion in aid to bolster Ukraine’s national defense.
In his note, Dunlap referred to the U.S. government as the “world’s largest bureaucracy” and essentially rebuked it as a defunct dinosaur.
“By the time the Government manages to produce something, it’s too often obsolete; no business would ever survive this way, nor should it,” he admonished.
While the tone of his LinkedIn note was restrained, Dunlap’s frustration was obvious.
His resignation letter echoed the sentiments of former Pentagon official Nicolas Chaillan, who quit in protest in September 2021 after expressing frustration with America’s lagging technological competitiveness.
At the time, Chaillan — who was appointed the Air Force’s first chief software officer in 2018 during the Trump administration — said it was pointless for him to continue in his position given the U.S. military’s current misguided priorities.
In his volcanic LinkedIn resignation letter, Chaillan said U.S. cyberdefenses were at “kindergarten level” and made the country an easy target for large-scale hacking operations that could cripple the nation’s infrastructure and banking systems.
He said it was a foregone conclusion that communist China will supplant the United States as the world’s pre-eminent superpower because it’s already on track to overtake the U.S. when it comes to artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare.
“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years,” Chaillan told the U.K.’s Financial Times in October. “Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion.”
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As a reminder, the Biden administration has made combating climate change and promoting transgenderism — not defending the homeland — the centerpieces of the nation’s military strategy.
Fueling the nation’s rapid slide into mediocrity is the left-wing crusade to eradicate academic standards in the name of racial “equity.”
BREAKING: NYC to eliminate gifted + talented classes over the next 5 yrs, major change and likely BdB’s last big decision as mayor. Kids now enrolled in gifted programs will stay in them, but there will be no more separate gifted classes for incoming kidshttps://t.co/WjcaBmBWmp
— Eliza Shapiro (@elizashapiro) October 8, 2021
USA is not even in the too 20 countries in this ranking of educational achievement for primary and secondary school.
Yes, we are in the top 3 of spending per student.
Don’t worry though the unions are filling kids heads full of anti-American hate & drugs are very easy to get. pic.twitter.com/qmGnyJQfoQ
— Chris Buskirk (@thechrisbuskirk) October 1, 2021
Lowering academic standards and prioritizing affirmative-action hiring practices do not help underachieving individuals or groups.
All they do is dumb down students and undercut American exceptionalism in the name of toxic “wokeness.” This is precisely why our foreign adversaries are likely to usurp the United States technologically, financially and socially.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
