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Notes -
But why are there issues with training pipelines, why was industrial capacity lost, why are there all these crap commanders who deflect responsibility?
In the US, training pipelines are inevitably going to be recruiting lower quality leaders since Americans are getting increasingly less interested in military service (hence a shortfall of recruits). The military is an inherently dangerous, demanding, stressful role. Lives are at stake. You don't get paid that much either compared to civilian jobs. There's a shortage of patriotism and dedication to ideals that gets high quality recruits to join and stay in the military for a long time. Soldiers fight best when they believe in something beyond dental plans and a free education.
There's also a culture issue in selecting commanders. It's a very bureaucratic, boxticking process which selects for suck-ups and master blame dodgers. Not necessarily people who know how to take risks and fight well:
See here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018/july/mission-command-and-zero-error-tolerance-cannot-coexist
Industrial capacity - this was jettisoned by greedy executives looking for higher margins and opportunistic cost-cutting by Pentagon officials. Around the 1970s and 80s there was a shift in corporate culture towards short-termism and a lack of capital investment in boring industries like steel and shells. Optimistic planners assumed there would be no need to fight slow, attritional wars with large quantities of munitions (despite these being the most important kind of war).
The defence contractors are themselves decadent and slack internally. I watched this long video from a guy who worked there: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo?list=LL
The TLDR of it is that management at Lockheed and NASA was toxic and grossly incompetent, they'd basically treat contractors like fourth-rate 'citizens', make them do all the work and then take credit for it, they'd do absolutely retarded nonsense like try and scale up tech from the Apollo era launchers, they'd lie about what was tested when and by who to keep the flow of money coming in, they'd say that every little change (from the idiots at NASA) required them to start over... Idiot managers would scream at the technical employees for asking questions to cover up their own worthlessness. If you knew what you were doing and tried to obey the rules you were the enemy. DEI made everything a lot worse. The reporting/whistleblowing system was wholly ineffective. This guy sure is disgruntled (and perhaps presents himself as too holier than thou) but, considering the ridiculous stretch of time it took to develop Orion, I'm inclined to believe him.
Institutions are downstream from culture. It isn't neccessarily that a decadent state must be effeminate and wimpy (they can just be addicted to civil wars like Byzantium) but a dysfunctional, short-termist, self-interested culture will naturally degrade key institutions needed for military power. Effeminacy is only one failure mode.
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