It does not take a particularly jaundiced eye to see that the American Empire is foundering. And now, to the long and growing list of wheels coming off the juggernaut, comes a new and startling piece of evidence of the decline and fall, one that is a profound shock to those swaddled most deeply in the myths of American exceptionalism.

Let’s first review, briefly, the last few years in the life of the Empire That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, setting aside the fact that it has started an endless progression of wars that it has been unable to win or, in many cases, end. This has in no way hampered the Empire’s (illogically named) defense budget — it spends twice as much on war, each year, as its two principal adversaries, Russia and China, combined. With the result that:

Many of its newest weapons, the most highly technological and most expensive in history, don’t work. The fabulous F-35 fighter jet can barely fly, can’t shoot, and breaks down every few hours.

The first of the awesome Zumwalt Class of guided missile destroyers, the most expensive ever built (does that go without saying now?) broke down on its maiden voyage and had to be towed out of the Panama Canal.

Parts are falling off of U.S. Air Force planes and dropping out of the skies all over Japan, further enraging a population already restive under the 70-year-old American occupation of their country.

Navy ships are running into each other and into random oil tankers and such all over the world.

But that’s just machinery, one could argue, while it is “boots on the ground,” as the latest dehumanizing metaphor has it, that really get results, such as the results we obtained in Afghanistan and Iraq. But now, just as our Tweeter-in-Chief wants more boots on more grounds (he is seriously suggesting an invasion of Venezuela), our ability to fill those boots has come seriously into question.

Nearly three quarters of young Americans — between 17 and 24 years of age — cannot qualify for military service because they are obese, or sick, or have a criminal record, or never graduated from high school.

The Trump administration wants to increase the number of active-duty military people by 26,900 — by next October. To replace losses and achieve its expansion plan, the Army alone needs to recruit 80,000 people this year. A great many of the personnel need to be pilots, computers programmers and cyber-security technicians, not jobs easily handled by obese, sick, stupid criminals. A major study of the problem just concluded by the Heritage Foundation is titled The Looming National Security Crisis and describes it as “an alarming situation which threatens the country’s fundamental national security.”

Inevitably, the discussion turns to the proposition that when standards cut down your numbers, lower the standards. It would be easy, and … well, it would be easy. But, it turns out, we’ve been there and done that. The Army lowered its standards on criminal records in 2009, only to find to its horror that a lot of the people it recruited on waivers despite their criminal records were, well, criminals.

If we don’t solve this problem quickly — by, for example, coming up with a large scale, error-free cloning program for Imperial Storm Troopers — we could be forced to end our endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, forego our eagerly anticipated wars with Iran and Venezuela, and abandon some of our 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. And what kind of empire would we be then?